Notes:
Supplementary material available at supporting website: http://qav.comlab.ox.ac.uk/projects/sysbio/fgf.php Further information and verification results also available from the PRISM case study page. |
Abstract.
Probabilistic model checking is a formal verification technique that has been successfully
applied to the analysis of systems from a broad range of domains, including security and
communication protocols, distributed algorithms and power management. In this paper we
illustrate its applicability to a complex biological system: the FGF (Fibroblast Growth
Factor) signalling pathway. We give a detailed description of how this case study can be
modelled in the probabilistic model checker PRISM, discussing some of the issues that arise in
doing so, and show how we can thus examine a rich selection of quantitative properties of this
model. We present experimental results for the case study under several different scenarios
and provide a detailed analysis, illustrating how this approach can be used to yield a better
understanding of the dynamics of the pathway. Finally, we outline a number of exact and approximate
techniques to enable the verification of larger and more complex pathways and apply several of them
to the FGF case study.
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