An Overview of Membrane Computing

Abstract

School of Computer and Information, Anqing Normal University, Anqing 246133, Anhui, ChinaMembrane computing is a new branch of natural computing whose aim is to abstract computingideas from the structure and the functioning of living cells, as well as from the cell cooperationin tissues, populations of cells and the brain. The obtained models are called P systems. Theresearch in this area developed very fast, both towards theory, such as Turing computability, lan-guage and automata theory (e.g., characterizations of Turing completeness), computational effi-ciency (polynomial solutions to NP-complete problems by trading off time to space) and applications(in system biology, bio-medicine, computer graphics, approximate optimization, robot control, cryp-tography, ecology and economics modeling, etc.). There are three main classes of P systems: (1)cell-like P systems inspired from living cells, (2) tissue-like P systems inspired from tissues, and(3) neural-like P systems inspired from neural systems. In this paper, we briefly introduce cell-likeand tissue-like P systems, and then discuss a class of neural-like P systems, called spiking neuralP systems, in details: the formal definition of the system is firstly introduced, and some results ofthe systems are recalled in two aspects: computational completeness and computational efficiency.