General description: BiNS is a simulation package for MolCom systems developed at the CNIT/University of Perugia. Its customizable design provides a set of tools allow creating objects modeling the behavior of biological entities. They can be regarded as either nodes (transmitters, receivers), carriers, or surrounding objects (e.g., vessel walls). In addition, BiNS permits to configure the properties of the simulated communication channel (e.g., the blood stream or the environment of an in vitro experiment) with the desired accuracy.
The simulator has been implemented in Java, and contains generic type of software object, named Nano Object. Nodes and carriers are specific implementations of the Nano Object, and, although they share its general features, they can exhibit very different functions. In particular, for any scenario, it is possible to differentiate the node object type at any time, thus obtaining a multitude of different node objects. The same properties are available for modeling carriers as Nano Objects.
The simulation is organized in discrete time steps. Each step consists of a number of phases, in which software objects are triggered in order to execute the operations associated with their specific behavior. The main phases are: transmission phase, reception phase, information processing phase, motion phase, object destruction phase (during which objects are removed due to lifetime expiration or because they exited from the area of interest), and collision management phase, which implements the elementary interaction between particles.
BiNS has been validated through wet-lab experiments related to cardiovascular medicine.
BiNS is available for download
here.
