P Systems with Transport and Diffusion Membrane Channels

Abstract

P Systems are computing devices inspired by the structure and the functioning of a living cell. A P System consists of a hierarchy of membranes, each of them containing a multiset of objects, a set of evolution rules, and possibly other membranes. Evolution rules are applied to the objects of the same membrane with maximal parallelism. In this paper we present an extension of P Systems, called P Systems with Membrane Channels (PMC Systems), in which membranes are enriched with channels and objects can pass through a membrane only if there are channels on the membrane that enable such a passage. We show that PMC Systems are universal even if only the simplest form of evolution rules is considered, and we give two application examples.