An Advanced Environment for Hybrid Modeling of Biological Systems Based on Modelica

• Main Authors: Proß Sabrina, Bachmann Bernhard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter 2011-03-01
• Series: Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics
• Online Access: http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jib.2011.8.issue-1/biecoll-jib-2011-152/biecoll-jib-2011-152.xml?format=INT

Biological systems are often very complex so that an appropriate formalism is needed for modeling their behavior. Hybrid Petri Nets, consisting of time-discrete Petri Net elements as well as continuous ones, have proven to be ideal for this task. Therefore, a new Petri Net library was implemented based on the object-oriented modeling language Modelica which allows the modeling of discrete, stochastic and continuous Petri Net elements by differential, algebraic and discrete equations. An appropriate Modelica-tool performs the hybrid simulation with discrete events and the solution of continuous differential equations. A special sub-library contains so-called wrappers for specific reactions to simplify the modeling process.