Observability of Boolean Control Networks: New Definition and Verification Algorithm

Boolean Control Networks (BCNs) are extensively employed for modelling biological systems, attracting considerable attention from biologists and systems scientists, in particularly, on the control theory of BCNs. This paper begins by demonstrating an erroneous definition of a specific property known as single-experiment observability, which was intended to represent the solvability of the BCNs’ single-experiment observation problem. Subsequently, we propose a novel form of observability to redefine this property. With this new definition, the determination of initial states for larger sets of BCNs can now be achieved through a single experiment. Furthermore, we present a verification algorithm designed for our definition, which exhibits lower computational complexity compared to the algorithms used for verifying the previous definition of BCNs’ single-experiment observability.