A new P-Lingua toolkit for agile development in membrane computing

Membrane computing is a massively parallel and non-deterministic bioinspired computing paradigm whose models are called P systems. Validating and testing such models is a challenge which is being overcome by developing simulators. Regardless of their heterogeneity, such simulators require to read and interpret the models to be simulated. To this end, P Lingua is a high-level P system definition language which has been widely used in the last decade. The P-Lingua ecosystem includes not only the language, but also libraries and software tools for parsing and simulating membrane computing models. Each version of P Lingua supported new types or variants of P systems. This leads to a shortcoming: Only a predefined list of variants can be used, thus making it difficult for researchers to study custom ones. Moreover, derivation modes cannot be user-defined, i.e, the way in which P system computations should be generated is determined by the simulation algorithm in the source code. The main contribution of this paper is a completely new design of the P-Lingua language, called P-Lingua 5, in which the user can define custom variants and derivation modes, among other improvements such as including procedural programming and simulation directives. It is worth mentioning that it has backward-compatibility with previous versions of the language. A completely new set of command-line tools is provided for parsing and simulating P-Lingua 5 files. Finally, several examples are included in this paper covering the most common P system types. (c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

This paper presents the challenges of validating and testing P system models in membrane computing and proposes a new design of the P-Lingua language that allows users to define custom variants and derivation modes, among other improvements. It also includes a set of command-line tools for parsing and simulating P-Lingua 5 files.