Finding Incoming Global States in Boolean Networks

This paper considers the problem of finding global states incoming to a specified global state in a Boolean network, which may be useful for pre-processing of finding a sequence of control actions for a Boolean network and for identifying the basin of attraction for a given attractor. We show that this problem is NP-hard in general along with related theoretical results. On the other hand, we present algorithms that are much faster than the naive exhaustive search-based algorithm.