Section: Research Program

The analysis of biological models

One of our application domains, the analysis of biological models, is not a classical target of static analysis because it aims at analyzing models instead of programs. Yet, the analysis of biological models is closely intertwined with the other application fields of our group. Firstly, abstract interpretation provides a formal understanding of the abstraction process which is inherent to the modeling process. Abstract interpretation is also used to better understand the systematic approaches which are used in the systems biology field to capture the properties of models, until getting formal, fully automatic, and scalable methods. Secondly, abstract interpretation is used to offer various semantics with different grains of abstraction, and, thus, new methods to apprehend the overall behavior of the models. Conversely, some of the methods and abstractions which are developed for biological models are inspired by the analysis of concurrent systems and by security analysis. Lastly, the analysis of biological models raises issues about differential systems, stochastic systems, and hybrid systems. Any breakthrough in these directions will likely be very important to address the important challenge of the certification of critical systems in interaction with their physical environment.