A New Decomposition Method for Attractor Detection in Large Synchronous Boolean Networks

Abstract

Boolean networks is a well-established formalism for modelling biological systems. An important challenge for analysing a Boolean network is to identify all its attractors. This becomes challenging for large Boolean networks due to the well-known state-space explosion problem. In this paper, we propose a new SCC-based decomposition method for attractor detection in large synchronous Boolean networks. Experimental results show that our proposed method is significantly better in terms of performance when compared to existing methods in the literature.