Mutual Mobile Membranes with Timers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new model of mobile membranes with timers to better reflect biological lifetimes, demonstrating that timers do not affect computational power and linking it to mobile ambients.

Contribution

It defines a timed mobile membrane system model, shows its computational equivalence to untimed systems, and encodes mobile ambients into this framework.

Findings

Timed and untimed systems have the same computational power.

Encoding mobile ambients into timed membranes establishes a formal relationship.

Timers effectively model biological object and membrane lifetimes.

Abstract

A feature of current membrane systems is the fact that objects and membranes are persistent. However, this is not true in the real world. In fact, cells and intracellular proteins have a well-defined lifetime. Inspired from these biological facts, we define a model of systems of mobile membranes in which each membrane and each object has a timer representing their lifetime. We show that systems of mutual mobile membranes with and without timers have the same computational power. An encoding of timed safe mobile ambients into systems of mutual mobile membranes with timers offers a relationship between two formalisms used in describing biological systems.