PORGY: Strategy-Driven Interactive Transformation of Graphs

TL;DR

PORGY is an interactive visual tool for modeling complex systems with port graphs, enabling users to explore graph rewriting rules and strategies to understand system behaviors and properties.

Contribution

This paper introduces PORGY, a novel interactive environment for graph rewriting that supports strategy-driven modeling and exploration of complex systems, especially in biochemistry.

Findings

Supports interactive exploration of graph rewriting systems

Allows navigation through derivation history

Facilitates modeling of biochemical systems

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of graph rewriting systems as a modelling tool, and advocates the embedding of such systems in an interactive environment. One important application domain is the modelling of biochemical systems, where states are represented by port graphs and the dynamics is driven by rules and strategies. A graph rewriting tool's capability to interactively explore the features of the rewriting system provides useful insights into possible behaviours of the model and its properties. We describe PORGY, a visual and interactive tool we have developed to model complex systems using port graphs and port graph rewrite rules guided by strategies, and to navigate in the derivation history. We demonstrate via examples some functionalities provided by PORGY.