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The standard definition of tissue P systems includes a special alphabet whose elements are assumed to appear in the initial configuration of the system in an arbitrarily large number of copies. These objects reside in a distinguished place of the system, called the environment. Such potentially infinite supply of objects seems an unfair tool when designing efficient solutions to computationally hard problems in the framework of membrane computing, by performing a space–time trade-off. This paper deals with computational aspects of tissue P systems with cell division where there is no environment having the property mentioned above. Specifically, we prove that the polynomial complexity classes associated with tissue P systems with cell division and with or without environment are actually identical. As a consequence, we conclude that it is not necessary to have infinitely many copies of some objects in the initial configuration in order to solveNP–complete problems in an efficient way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article introduces a general formalism/framework flexible enough to cover descriptions of different variants of P systems having a dynamic membrane structure. Our framework can be useful for the precise definition of new variants of P systems with a dynamic structure and for the comparison of existing definitions as well as for their extension. We give a detailed definition of the formalism and we present some examples of how to translate several existing variants of P systems with a dynamic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Trading (in polynomial time) space for time in the framework of membrane systems is not sufficient to efficiently solve computationally hard problems. On the one hand, an exponential number of objects generated in polynomial time is not sufficient to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. On the other hand, when an exponential number of membranes is created and used as workspace, the situation is very different. Two operations in P systems (membrane division and membrane creation) capable of constructing an exponential number of membranes in linear time are studied in this paper. NP-complete problems can be solved in polynomial time using P systems with active membranes and with polarizations, but when electrical charges are not used, then dissolution rules turn out to be very important. We show that in the framework of P systems with active membranes but without polarizations and in the framework of P systems with membrane creation, dissolution rules play a crucial role from the computational efficiency point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We improve, by using register machines, some existing universality results for specific models of P systems. P systems with membrane creation are known to generate all recursively enumerable sets of vectors of non-negative integers, even when no region (except the environment) contains more than one object of the same kind. We show here that they generate all recursively enumerable languages, and that two membrane labels are sufficient (the same result holds for accepting all recursively enumerable vectors of non-negative integers). Moreover, at most two objects are present inside the system at any time in the generative case. We then prove that 10+m symbols are sufficient to generate any recursively enumerable language over m symbols. P systems with active membranes without polarizations are known to generate all recursively enumerable sets of vectors of non-negative integers. We show that they generate all recursively enumerable languages; four starting membranes with three labels or seven starting membranes with two labels are sufficient. P systems with active membranes and two polarizations are known to generate/accept all recursively enumerable sets of vectors of non-negative integers, using only rules of rewriting and sending objects out. We show that accepting can be done by deterministic systems. Finally, we show that P systems with restricted membrane creation (the newly created membrane can only be of the same kind as the parent one) generate at least matrix languages, even when having at most one object in the configuration (except the environment). We conclude by presenting a summary of the main results obtained in this paper and a list of open questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]