Optimal Control of Probabilistic Boolean Networks Using Integer Programming

Abstract

In this paper, the optimal control problem of probabilistic Boolean networks (PBNs) is discussed. A PBN is one of the significant models in biological networks. Although some control methods of PBNs have been proposed so far, it is necessary to compute the state transition diagram with 2ⁿ nodes for a given PBN with n states. To avoid this computation, an integer programming-based approach is proposed. In the proposed method, PBNs are transformed into a linear system with binary variables, and the optimal control problem is reduced to an integer linear programming problem, which can be computed relatively easier than the existing methods.