An integer programming approach to control problems in probabilistic Boolean networks

In this paper, control problems of probabilistic Boolean networks (PBNs) are discussed. A PBN is one of the significant models in biological networks such as gene regulatory networks. Although there are some results in control of PBNs, 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 control problem is reduced to an integer linear programming problem, which can be computed relatively easier than the existing methods using the state transition diagram.