Towards a General Framework for Membrane Algorithms

Optimization problems have always been, and nowadays even more than ever, a subject of major concern, given their in uence in the solution of very relevant daily matters (i.e., worldwide packaging and transport, involving problems like KNAPSACK or TSP). Many classical meta-heuristics have been proposed to solve these kinds of problems, from simulated annealing to evolutionary algorithms or collective intelligence approaches like ant or bee colonies. Membrane computing brought an alternative set of hybrid al- gorithms taking the best of P systems and classical meta-heuristics in an attempt to improve the previous approaches. However, the heterogeneity of those approaches also brought some mess to the discipline, and a thesis project was proposed to try to formalise a general conceptual framework for membrane algorithms, and also provide a rst set of tools inside P-Lingua for the simulation of those approaches formalised within the framework.