Reduction and Analysis of Boolean Control Networks by Bisimulation
Rui Li, Qi Zhang, Tianguang Chu
Abstract
The concept of bisimulation has been recently introduced in the study of Boolean control networks (BCNs). The notion provides a perspective that explains how a state trajectory of one BCN can be paired with a state trajectory of another BCN, and vice versa. The present paper further pursues the notion of bisimulation in BCNs. It first gives necessary and sufficient conditions for checking this notion. The conditions are more general and neater than those previously published; more importantly, they allow us to go further to consider reducing a BCN via bisimulation. A bisimulation-based methodology is then proposed to reduce the size of the state space of a BCN. Applying the reduction methodology allows one to infer control properties of a BCN from those of the corresponding reduced system. Possibilities of applications of the results are illustrated on several Boolean models of real biomolecular systems.