FG Datenstrukturen und Softwarezuverlässigkeit
Membrane systems are a very powerful computational modelling formalism inspired by the internal organisation of living cells. Modelling of membrane systems is challenged by composing many structurally similar components, which may result in very large models. Furthermore, some components may suffer from a lack of precise kinetic parameters. Coloured fuzzy Petri nets combine coloured Petri nets with fuzzy kinetic parameters, and thus offer an approach to address these challenges. In this paper, we use coloured fuzzy Petri nets to model and simulate membrane systems which are enriched by fuzzy kinetic parameters. We also introduce a methodology and workflow utilising coloured fuzzy Petri nets for modelling and simulating general biological systems which have to cope with incomplete knowledge of their kinetic data.
We present a methodology for systematically extending epidemic models to multilevel and multiscale spatio-temporal pandemic ones. Our approach builds on the use of coloured stochastic and continuous Petri nets facilitating the sound component-based extension of basic SIR models to include population stratification and also spatio-geographic information and travel connections, represented as graphs, resulting in robust stratified pandemic metapopulation models. The epidemic components and the spatial and stratification data are combined together in these coloured models and built in to the underlying expanded models. As a consequence this method is inherently easy to use, producing scalable and reusable models with a high degree of clarity and accessibility which can be read either in a deterministic or stochastic paradigm. Our method is supported by a publicly available platform PetriNuts; it enables the visual construction and editing of models; deterministic, stochastic and hybrid simulation as well as structural and behavioural analysis. All models are available as Supplementary Material, ensuring reproducibility. All uncoloured Petri nets can be animated within a web browser at https://www-dssz.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/DSSZ/Research/ModellingEpidemics, assisting the comprehension of those models. We aim to enable modellers and planners to construct clear and robust models by themselves.
Over the last twenty years, Petri nets have been increasingly adopted for modelling and simulating biological systems, as they offer an intuitive and graphical approach for this purpose. Their usability convenience comes from the fact that they offer many types of elements to describe systems in a qualitative and quantitative way. Coloured Petri nets are particularly useful to model systems with repeated components in a compact fashion. Our tool Snoopy for modelling and simulating Petri nets is one of the most well-known tools supporting a family of related Petri net classes comprising stochastic, continuous and hybrid Petri nets, and covering uncoloured and coloured Petri nets alike. However, kinetic information of a biological system, i.e. kinetic parameters may be uncertain, due to many reasons, e.g. environmental factors. Besides, coloured Petri nets as they were previously supported in Snoopy suffered from some inconsistencies. Due to these inconsistencies, exploring the model behaviour using different sizes (scaleability) was not feasible. Both challenges call for a new and more powerful approach integrating the modelling of uncertainties together with modelling features supporting repeated structures in a compact and scalable way.
This thesis comprises two major contributions: Firstly, we introduce the definition and present the simulation algorithm for both uncoloured and coloured fuzzy Petri nets, by extending the existing quantitative uncoloured and coloured Petri nets in Snoopy. This includes discretising the uncertain kinetic parameters to crisp values by using sampling strategies. Secondly, we harmonise coloured Petri nets in Snoopy with their uncoloured counterparts and we extend the Snoopy’s coloured Petri nets by all the features, which are supported by the coloured abstract net description language - an exchange format of coloured Petri nets in our PetriNuts tool family.
By performing fuzzy simulation, one can obtain two kinds of output: fuzzy bands of each output variable and their corresponding timed-membership functions. Each fuzzy band describes the uncertainties associated with the input, whereas membership functions give more accurate information about the associated uncertainties. The most important features that we obtain by harmonising coloured Petri nets are to develop scaleable models, by defining scaling factors as constants and unifying the usage of coloured Petri nets with the other tools in our PetriNuts tool family.
Integrated modelling of biological systems is becoming a necessity for constructing models containing the major biochemical processes of such systems in order to obtain a holistic understanding of their dynamics and to elucidate emergent behaviours. Hybrid modelling methods are crucial to achieve integrated modelling of biological systems. This paper reviews currently popular hybrid modelling methods, developed for systems biology, mainly revealing why they are proposed, how they are formed from single modelling formalisms and how to simulate them. By doing this, we identify future research requirements regarding hybrid approaches for further promoting integrated modelling of biological systems.
Reproducibility of simulation experiments is still a significant challenge and has attracted considerable attention in recent years. One cause of this situation is bad habits of the scientific community. Many results are published without data or source code, and only a textual description of the simulation set-up is provided. Other causes are: no complete simulation set-up, no proper output data analysis and inconsistency of published data, which makes it impossible to compare results.
The progress of computational modelling, amount of data and complexity of models requires designing experiments in such a way that ensures reproducibility. A textual description does not provide all the needed details. A computer code is more reliable than a textual description. It is the precise specification that describes a simulation configuration, model, etc. When computer code, data, models and all parameters are provided, the simulation results become reproducible.
The main goal of this thesis is to develop a tool that ensures reproducibility and efficient execution of simulation experiments, often involving many individual simulation runs. The tool should support a wide range of application scenarios, where the typical scenario is simulation of biochemical reaction networks, which are represented as (coloured) Petri nets interpreted in the stochastic, continuous or hybrid paradigm. The model to be simulated can be given in various formats, including SBML.
The result is a command line tool called Spike, which can be used for various scenarios, including benchmarking, simulation of adaptive models and parameter optimization. It builds on a human-readable configuration script SPC, supporting the efficient specification of multiple model configurations as well as multiple simulator configurations in a single configuration file.