Decidability of model-checking P systems

Abstract. Membrane computing is a branch of molecular computing that aims to develop models and paradigms that are biologically motivated. It identifies an unconventional computing model, namely a P system, from natural phenomena of cell evolutions and chemical reactions. Because of the nature of maximal parallelism inherent in the model, P systems have a great potential for implementing massively concurrent systems in an efficient way that would allow us to solve currently intractable problems (in much the same way as the promise of quantum and DNA computing) once future bio-technology gives way to practical bio-realization. In this paper, we look at various models of P systems and investigate their model-checking problems. We identify what is decidable (or undecidable) about model-checking these systems under extended logic formalisms of CTL. We also report on some experiments on whether existing conservative (symbolic) model-checking techniques can be practically applied to handle P systems with a reasonable size.