Automaton-like P Colonies

In this paper we study P colonies where the environment is given as a string. These variants, called automaton-like P systems or APCol systems, behave like automata: during functioning, the agents change their own states and process the symbols of the string. We develop the concept of APCol systems by introducing the notion of their generating working mode. We then compare the power of APCol systems working in the generating mode and that of register machines and context-free matrix grammars with and without appearance checking.