Petri Nets in Systems Biology: Methodology and Applications (Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, 1508)

Petri Nets in Systems Biology presents a rigorous and coherent framework for modeling and analyzing complex biological systems.Positioned at the intersection of computer science, biomedicine, bioinformatics, and target-based drug discovery, the book demonstrates how Petri nets naturally capture key characteristics of biological processes, including concurrency, synchronization, causality, stochastic, and fuzzy behavior. The book introduces fundamental Petri net concepts and progressively extends them to address core problems in systems biology, such as the modeling of metabolic networks, gene regulatory systems, signal transduction pathways, and cellular control mechanisms.Both qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques are covered, including invariant analysis, reachability, structural properties, stochastic modeling, and hybrid extensions. A strong emphasis is placed on modularity, compositional modeling, and biological interpretability, enabling readers to construct scalable a