On P Systems and Almost Periodicity

The study of P systems as a mathematical model for biological systems is an important research topic in the area of membrane computing. In this respect, the detection of periodicity and almost periodicity as aspects of the system dynamics seems to be of particular relevance for understanding many biological processes and their related phenomena. This paper introduces specific notions of periodicity and almost periodicity for (infinite) sequences of multisets, which are used to describe the dynamics of P systems. Specifically, a variant of P systems, called P systems with resources, is considered where the rules always consume a certain amount of resources, which are provided in the form of a periodic input sequence of multisets. It is then shown that P systems with resources are computationally complete (when halting computations are considered) and that, in general, they can generate sequences of multisets that are not even almost periodic (once the constraint of having halting computation is released). However, if P systems with resources are restricted to be deterministic, it is shown that a characterization of the behaviour of a particular class of P systems with resources can be obtained in terms of almost periodicty.