A biologically inspired model with fusion and clonation of membranes

P-systems represent an important class of biologically inspired computational models. In this paper, we study computational properties of a variation of P-systems with rules that model in an abstract way fusion and clonation of membranes. We focus our attention on extended P-systems with an interleaving semantics and symbol objects and we investigate decision problems like reachability of a configuration, boundedness (finiteness of the state space), and coverability (verification of safety properties). In particular we use the theory of well-structured transition systems to prove that both the coverability and the boundedness problems are decidable for PB systems with fusion and clonation. Our results represent a preliminary step towards the development of automated verification procedures for concurrent systems with biologically inspired operations like fusion and clonation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.SCOPUS: cp.kinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe