Steady state distributions in generalized exclusion processes

Abstract

The asymmetric simple exclusion process (ASEP) is a model of particle transport used in the study of biological processes such as mRNA translation. In 2014, Zhao and Krishnan introduced a new approach for analyzing the ASEP using probabilistic Boolean networks (PBN). In this paper, we revisit and further explore the PBN approach, with focus on computing steady state distributions. Explicit forms of the structure matrices of some common transitions are obtained. In addition, we derive a simplified method for computing the structure matrices of Boolean functions and a general method for writing the Boolean functions. These methods are also extended to multi-valued logic networks for application in multi-species exclusion processes.