Partial knowledge in membrane systems: A logical approach

We propose a logic for specifying and proving properties of membrane systems. The main idea is to approach a membrane system by using the "point of view" of an external observer. Observers (as epis-temic agents) accumulate their knowledge from the partial information they collect by observing subparts of the system and by applying logical reasoning to this information. We provide a formal framework to combine and interpret distributed knowledge in order to recover the complete knowledge about a membrane system. The proposed logic can be used to model biological situations where information concerning parts of the biological system is missing or incomplete. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.