Attractor-Based Simultaneous Design of the Minimum Set of Control Nodes and Controllers in Boolean Networks

Design of control strategies for gene regulatory networks is a challenging and important topic in systems biology. In this paper, the problem of finding both a minimum set of control nodes (control inputs) and a controller is studied. A control node corresponds to a gene that expression can be controlled. Here, a Boolean network is used as a model of gene regulatory networks, and control specifications on attractors, which represent cell types or states of cells, are imposed. It is important to design a gene regulatory network that has desired attractors and has no undesired attractors. Using a matrix-based representation of BNs, this problem can be rewritten as an integer linear programming problem. Finally, the proposed method is demonstrated by a numerical example on a WNT5A network, which is related to melanoma.

Input Structure Design for Structural Controllability of Complex Networks

This paper addresses the problem of the input design of large-scale complex networks.Two types of network components,redundant inaccessible strongly connected component(RISCC)and intermittent inaccessible strongly connected component(IISCC)are defined,and a subnetwork called a driver network is developed.Based on these,an efficient method is proposed to find the minimum number of controlled nodes to achieve structural complete controllability of a network,in the case that each input can act on multiple state nodes.The range of the number of input nodes to achieve minimal control,and the configuration method(the connection between the input nodes and the controlled nodes)are presented.All possible input solutions can be obtained by this method.Moreover,we give an example and some experiments on real-world networks to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.

One-to-Any Command and Control Model:Precisely Coordinated Operation on Uncooperative Controlled Nodes

New precisely cooperative attacks, such as the coordi- nated cross plane session termination （CXPST） attack, need thou- sands upon thousands machines to attack diverse selected links simultaneously with the given rate. However, almost all command and control（C＆C） mechanisms only provide publishing one com- mand to the whole once, so-called one-to-all C＆C model, and are not productive to support CXPST-alike attacks. In this paper, we present one-to-any C＆C model on coordination among the unco- operative controlled nodes. As an instance of one-to-any C＆C model, directional command publishing （DCP） mechanism lever- aging on Kademlia is provided with a range-mapping key creating algorithm for commands to compute the publishing range and a statistically stochastic node querying scheme to obtain the com- mands immediately. With theoretical analysis and simulation, it is indicated that one-to-any C＆C model fits for precisely coordi- nated operation on uncooperative controlled nodes with least complexity, better accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, DCP mechanism can support one-to-all command publishing at the same time. As an example of future C＆C model, studying on one-to-any C＆C model may help to promote the development of more efficient countermeasures.