Tools and simulators for membrane computing-a literature review

Abstract

Membrane Computing comes under the field of Natural Computing. This was introduced by Gheorghe Paun. This field has been there from a decade. To realize Membrane Computing it is important to have tools that can be used either to process or simulate membrane computing. There have been several attempts in this area. This paper is an attempt to provide the details of the tools that are available for membrane computing. Primarily the tools are classified into two components. On one hand we have tools that are being used for specific type of P Systems or the tools which have a specific application. On the other hand there are tools which are comparatively generic in nature. Further this paper lists the tools that have been designed and developed to be used for the biological applications of P Systems. After classification, a brief description of the tools is given in this paper. Finally a brief quantitative analysis of the tools is done. Though there have been few surveys of P System tools, this is a slightly different paper which tries to classify and tries to a give review of the tools. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2016.