Enzymatic numerical P systems - a new class of membrane computing systems

A P system represents a distributed and parallel computing model in which basic data structures are multi-sets, strings or numerical variables. Numerical P systems have been introduced for possible applications in economics. A simulator for numerical P systems (SNUPS) has been designed, implemented and made available to the scientific community by the authors of this paper. SNUPS allows the development of a wide range of applications, from modeling and simulation of ordinary differential equations, to design and simulation of computational blocks for cognitive architectures and of membrane controllers for autonomous mobile robots. This paper introduces a new class of membrane computing systems, that of enzymatic numerical P systems, in which enzyme-like variables allow the existence of more than one production function in each membrane. The way this new type of deterministic numerical P systems works and the corresponding implementation in SNUPS are detailed, together with an illustrative example.