Detecting attractors in biological models with uncertain parameters

Abstract

Complex behaviour arising in biological systems is typically characterised by various kinds of attractors. An important problem in this area is to determine these attractors. Biological systems are usually described by highly parametrised dynamical models that can be represented as parametrised graphs typically constructed as discrete abstractions of continuous-time models. In such models, attractors are observed in the form of terminal strongly connected components (tSCCs). In this paper, we introduce a novel method for detecting tSCCs in parametrised graphs. The method is supplied with a parallel algorithm and evaluated on discrete abstractions of several non-linear biological models.