Defining and Executing P Systems with Structured Data in K

摘要

K is a rewrite-based framework proposed for giving formal executable semantics to programming languages and/or calculi. K departs from other rewrite-based frameworks in two respects: (1) it assumes multisets and lists as builtin, the former modeling parallel features, while the latter sequential ones; and (2) the parallel application of rewriting rules is extended from non-overlapping rules to rules which may overlap, but on parts which are not changed by these rules (may overlap on "read only" parts). This paper shows how P systems and variants can be defined as K (rewrite) systems. This is the first representation of P systems into a rewrite-based framework that captures the behavior (reaction steps) of the original P system step-for-step. In addition to providing a formal executable semantic framework for P systems, the embedding of P systems as K systems also serves as a basis for experimenting with and developing new extensions of P systems, e.g., with structured data. A Maude-based application for executing P systems defined in K has been implemented and experimented with; initial results show computational advantages of using structured objects in P systems.