Abstract

Abstract. We give a description of a Petri net-based framework for modelling and analysing biochemical pathways, which unifies the qualitative, stochastic and continuous paradigms. Each perspective adds its contribution to the understanding of the system, thus the three approaches do not compete, but complement each other. We illustrate our approach by applying it to an extended model of the three stage cascade, which forms the core of the ERK signal transduction pathway. Consequently our focus is on transient behaviour analysis. We demonstrate how qualitative descriptions are abstractions over stochastic or continuous descriptions, and show that the stochastic and continuous models approximate each other. Although our framework is based on Petri nets, it can be applied more widely to other formalisms which are used to model and analyse biochemical networks. Motivation Biochemical reaction systems have by their very nature three distinctive characteristics. (1) They are inherently bipartite, i.e. they consist of two types of game players, the species and their interactions. (2) They are inherently concurrent, i.e. several interactions can usually happen independently and in parallel. (3) They are inherently stochastic, i.e. the timing behaviour of the interactions is governed by stochastic laws. So it seems to be a natural choice to model and analyse them with a formal method, which shares exactly these distinctive characteristics: stochastic Petri nets. However, due to the computational efforts required to analyse stochastic models, two abstractions are more popular: qualitative models, abstracting away from any time dependencies, and continuous models, commonly used to approximate stochastic behaviour by a deterministic one. We describe an overall framework to unify these three paradigms, providing a family of related models with high analytical power. The advantages of using Petri nets as a kind of umbrella formalism are seen in the following: M. Bernardo, P. Degano, and G. Zavattaro (Eds.): SFM