Compositional colored Petri net approach to multiscale modeling for systems biology

Colored Petri nets have been demonstrated as a powerful tool for modeling multiscale systems biology.However,the construction of colored Petri nets for biological systems requires prior knowledge about colored Petri nets and is often error-prone and cum-bersome for biologists,especially when the communication between components and hierarchical organization of components in a multiscale model are an issue.To address this problem,an established way is to develop small components and then compose them into bigger models.In this paper,we present a compositional colored Petri net approach to aid automatic modeling of systems biology,and demonstrate it with two case stud-ies.We focus on the modeling of communication between components and hierarchical organization of components as they are key to build multiscale models.