On the Complexity of Finding Control Strategies for Boolean Networks

Abstract

This paper considers a problem of finding control strategies for Boolean networks, where Boolean networks have been used as a model of genetic networks. This paper shows that finding a control strategy leading to the desired global state is NP-hard even if there is only one control node in the network. This result justifies existing exponential time algorithms for finding control strategies for probabilistic Boolean networks. On the other hand, this paper shows that the problem can be solved in polynomial time if the network has a tree structure.