A new decomposition-based method for detecting attractors in synchronous Boolean networks

摘要

Boolean networks are a well-established formalism for modelling biological systems. An important aspect of analysing a Boolean network is to identify all its attractors. This becomes challenging for large Boolean networks due to the infamous state-space explosion problem. In this paper, we propose a new strongly connected component (SCC) based decomposition method for attractor detection in large synchronous Boolean networks and prove its correctness. Experimental results show that our proposed method is significantly better in terms of performance when compared to existing methods in the literature. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.