An Overview of Membrane Computing

Membrane Computing is a

natural computing

paradigm aiming to abstract computing models from the structure and functioning of the living cell as well as from the cooperation of cells in tissues, organs and other populations of cells. This direction of research was initiated by Gh. Păun in November 1998 [25]. In the last twelve years, the area has grown substantially: initial research focussed on understanding computability aspects using formal language theoretic elements, and using membrane computing as a parallel computing device capable of solving intractable problems; over the years, membrane computing has been found useful in modelling biological processes, simulating ecosystems, and also finds some applications in areas like economics, computer graphics and approximate optimization. Off late, complexity classes (time, space) of membrane systems and their connection with the classical complexity classes have been investigated. The connection of membrane computing with other areas like petri nets, brane calculi, process algebra, dynamical systems, X-machines and models based on fuzzy sets is an active and important recent line of research. In this paper, we give a high level overview of the research in membrane computing over the last 12 years.