P Systems and Petri Nets

We propose an intriguing relationship between P systems and Petri nets. For a basic model of P systems, this paper presents a new formalization based on place/transition nets, which can adopt one transition to implement the structural operational semantics of one evolving rule in P systems and utilize incidence matrix to analyze the computation of one macro-step. We also define the behavioral properties in P systems such as terminating, liveness, and boundedness based on this formalization. For a general class of P systems, we briefly describe a high-level framework called membrane Petri nets (MP-nets). MP-nets extend ordinary colored Petri nets (CPN) through introducing the dynamic features such as dissolve, divide, and move inspired by P systems. Therefore, MP-nets can be a graphical as well as an algebraic modelling tool for both generic P systems and dynamic CPN.