This volume represents the proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Membrane Computing and Biologically Inspired Process Calculi (MeCBIC 2011), held together with the 12th International Conference on Membrane Computing on 23rd August 2011 in Fontainebleau, France.
This volume represents the proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Membrane Computing and Biologically Inspired Process Calculi (MeCBIC 2011), held together with the 12th International Conference on Membrane Computing on 23rd August 2011 in Fontainebleau, France.
MeCBIC is usually devoted to membrane computing and biologically inspired process calculi (ambients, brane calculi). This year we also attracted papers dealing with bio-inspired Petri nets in order to promote collaboration between the Petri nets and membrane computing communities.
Biological membranes play a fundamental role in the complex reactions which take place in cells of living organisms. Membrane systems were introduced as a class of distributed parallel computing devices inspired by the observation that any biological system is a complex hierarchical structure, with a flow of biochemical substances and information that underlies their functioning. The modelling and analysis of biological systems has also attracted considerable interest from both the Petri nets and the process calculi research communities. A deeper investigation of the relationships between these formalisms is interesting, providing valuable cross fertilization of these research areas. Membrane computing deals with the computational properties, making use of automata, formal languages, and complexity results. Certain process calculi, such as mobile ambients and brane calculi, work also with notions of compartments and membranes. Petri nets are used to model and analyze the biological systems.
The submitted papers describe biologically inspired models and calculi, biologically inspired languages, properties of biologically inspired models and languages, theoretical links and comparison between different models. All submitted papers were reviewed by three or four referees. We thank the authors and reviewers for doing an excellent job; without their enthusiastic work this volume would not have been possible. We are indebted to the members of the Programme Committee: We express our gratitude to the invited speakers Jetty Kleijn and Cosimo Laneve for their very interesting talks. The first talk presents similarities and differences between Petri nets and membrane systems, and how to enhance the Petri nets in order to faithfully model the dynamics of the biological phenomena represented by membrane systems and reaction systems. The second talk deals with reversibility in massive concurrent systems; reversible structures for massive concurrent systems are introduced and studied, and an equivalence on computations that abstracts away from the order of causally independent reductions is defined.
The main aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on membrane computing, in biologically inspired process calculi, and in Petri nets in order to present their recent results and to discuss new ideas concerning these formalisms, their properties and relationships. Many thanks to Sergey Verlan and Maciej Koutny for their help in organizing the workshop, and to Bogdan Aman for his help in preparing this volume.
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