Observability of Periodically Switched Boolean Control Networks

In this paper, observability is studied for periodically switched Boolean control networks (PSBCNs), which are managed with periodic switching signal and consist of some Boolean control networks. Firstly, via semi-tensor product of matrices, PSBCNs are expressed as algebraic forms. Secondly, a parallel system is constructed by combining two same PSBCNs, based on which, the observability problem of the original PSBCN can be transformed into the set reachability problem of this parallel system. Then, two necessary and sufficient conditions are obtained to detect reachability of parallel systems and observability of PSBCNs. In addition, the proposed conditions are extended to the case of state constraints. Finally, a practical example and a numerical example are provided to illustrate the results.