P versus B: P Systems as a Formal Framework for Controllability of Boolean Networks

Membrane computing and P systems are a paradigm of massively parallel natural computing introduced by Gheorghe Păun in 1999, inspired by the structure of the living cell and by its biochemical reactions. In spite of this explicit biological motivation, P systems have not been extensively used in modelling real-world systems. To confirm this intuition, we establish a state of the art investigation comparing the use of P systems to that of Boolean networks in this line of research. We then propose to use P systems as a tool for setting up formal frameworks to reason about other formalisms, and we introduce Boolean P systems, specifically tailored for capturing sequential controllability of Boolean networks. We show how to tackle some technical challenges and prove that sequential controllability properly embeds in the framework of Boolean P systems.