Adapting Biochemical Kripke Structures for Distributed Model Checking

Abstract

In this paper, we use some observations on the nature of biochemical reactions to derive interesting properties of qualitative biochemical Kripke structures. We show that these characteristics make Kripke structures of biochemical pathways suitable for assumption based distributed model checking. The number of chemical species participating in a biochemical reaction is usually bounded by a small constant. This observation is used to show that the Hamming distance between adjacent states of a qualitative biochemical Kripke structures is bounded. We call such structures as Bounded Hamming Distance Kripke structures (BHDKS). We, then, argue the suitability of assumption based distributed model checking for BHDKS by constructively deriving worst case upper bounds on the size of the fragments of the state space that need to be stored at each distributed node. We also show that the distributed state space can be mapped naturally to a hypercube based distributed architecture. We support our results by experimental evaluation over benchmarks and biochemical pathways from public databases.