A proposal of multi-agent simulation system for membrane computing devices

Membrane Computing (or P-System theory) is a recent area of Natural Computing, the field of computer science that works with computational techniques inspired by nature and natural systems. Particularly, Membrane computing investigates models of computation inspired by the structure and functioning of biological cells focusing attention on their distributed and parallel transformations. Different software applications which have been developed in imperative languages, like Java, or in declaratives languages, as Prolog, work in the framework of Membrane Computing systems. These applications simulate the behavior of P-System focusing on details about computational power of different Membrane devices without exploiting the distributed nature of simulated cellular structures. This paper presents a parallel and distributed application, based on Multi-Agent System technology, able to simulate Membrane Computing devices. The aim is to show how the theoretical distributed nature of P-Systems can be mapped into a real distributed Multi-Agent System in order to achieve two important goals: 1) to define a theoretical computational model for Multi-Agent System architectures; 2) to design a software application able to simulate Membrane Computing devices in a real fashion by exploiting the distributed nature of Multi-Agent System technology. © 2007 IEEE.