Methods developed for the qualitative
simulation of dynamical systems have turned out to be powerful tools for
studying genetic regulatory networks. A bottleneck in the application of
these methods is the analysis of the simulation results. In this paper, we
propose a combination of qualitative simulation and model-checking
techniques to perform this task correctly and efficiently. By means of the
example of the network controlling the initiation of sporulation in
B. subtilis, we argue that this approach is
well-adapted to the kind of questions biologists habitually ask and the
kind of data available to answer these questions.