On Model-Checking of P Systems

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 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.