Controllability of reaction systems

Abstract

Controlling a dynamical system is the ability of changing its configuration arbitrarily through a suitable choice of inputs. It is a very well studied concept in control theory, with wide ranging applications in medicine, biology, social sciences, engineering. We introduce in this article the concept of controllability of reaction systems as the ability of transitioning between any two states through a suitable choice of context sequences. We show that the problem is PSPACE-hard. We also introduce a model of oncogenic signalling based on reaction systems and use it to illustrate the intricacies of the controllability of reaction systems.