Time-independent P systems

We introduce a class of P systems called timed P systems where to each rule is associated an integer that represents the time needed by the rule (reaction) to be entirely executed. The idea comes from cell biology where chemical reactions take certain times to be executed. In this work we are interested in a special class of P systems, called time-free, working always in the same way (i.e., always producing the same result) independently from the values associated to the execution time of their rules. Later we introduce a generalization of time-free P systems, namely clock-free P systems, where a time of execution is associated directly to each single application of the rules (in this case, different applications, even of the same rule, may take a different time to be executed). Several results are presented together with open problems and research proposals. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.