Structural Observability of Boolean Control Networks via Topology-Based Approach

This brief aims to investigate the structural observability of Boolean control networks, followed by the recent research stream, with available topology structure but unknown node dynamics. To begin with, two kinds of structural observability are defined along with two systems. Then, by adopting the dependency graphs, several necessary and sufficient conditions for structurally arbitrary-input and single-input observability are derived, respectively. Instead of employing the algebraic state space representation framework, this graphic-theoretical approach takes full advantage of node-to-node interaction, thus decreasing the time complexity to a great extent.