A Hybrid Petri Net for Modelling Hybrid Biochemical Interactions

Recently hybrid modelling and simulation of biochemical systems have attracted increasing interest. This is motivated by the need of simulating systems which integrate different sub-cellular models, and the fact that bio networks themselves are inherently stochastic, however stochastic simulation is time expensive. Compared to other methods of biological modelling, Petri nets are characterized by their intuitive visual representation and executability of biological models. In this paper, we present a hybrid Petri net class that incorporates both continuous and stochastic capabilities. The presented class is intended to model and simulate hybrid biological systems such that they contain some parts which are simulated deterministically while other parts are simulated stochastically.