Solving Vertex Cover Problem by Means of Tissue P Systems with Cell Separation

Tissue P systems is a computing model in the framework of membrane computing inspired from intercellular communication and cooperation between neurons. Many different variants of this model have been proposed. One of the most important models is known as tissue P systems with cell separation. This model has the ability of generating an exponential amount of workspace in linear time, thus it allows us to design cellular solutions to NP-complete problems in polynomial time. In this paper, we present a solution to the Vertex Cover problem via a family of such devices. This is the first solution to this problem in the framework of tissue P systems with cell separation