LARSyS Lecture Series in Engineering and Mathematics 

27/03/2012, 14:00 — 15:00 — Conference Room, Instituto de Sistemas e Robótica, North Tower, 7th floor, IST
Bernold Fiedler, Free University Berlin

Determining nodes for regulatory networks

We consider systems of differential equations which model complex regulatory networks by a graph structure of dependencies. We show that the concepts of informative nodes (Mochizuki) and determining nodes (Foias, Temam) coincide with the notion of feedback vertex sets from graph theory. As a result we can determine the long-time dynamics of the entire network from observations on the feedback vertex set, only. We present biological examples of gene-regulatory and signal transduction networks where the required observation set is much smaller than the entire regulatory network. Since the mathematical scope of our approach is much broader, however, we actively seek discussion of regulatory and control aspects in other networks, for example in electrical engineering, multi-agent coupling, neural networks, and the like.