From Super-cells to Robotic Swarms: Two Decades of Evolution in the Simulation of P Systems

Abstract

Membrane Computing provides machine-oriented models of computation, with types and variants including different elements inspired from living cells. Proven computationally complete from their inception, they also showed their ability to solve computationally hard problems. Thus, it is crucial accompanying the theoretical stud- ies with the practical materialization of these devices. While their real implementation presents serious limitations, a more affordable goal is the simulation of these machines, both to aid in the understanding of the theoretical models, and to provide tools to solve problems in different areas (Biology, Economy, robot control, etc.) by P systems-based models. Several works have analysed the history and state of the art of the simulation tools for P systems, the last one in 2016. Therefore, instead of repeating this information, we decided to provide a brief summary, along with an interactive tool to visualize on-line the evolution of these simulators, intended to stay updated as new simulation tools keep appearing on stage