Editing Configurations of P Systems

This paper proposes and preliminarily investigates the possibility of transforming a configuration (membrane structure and multisets of symbol-objects present in the compartments of this membrane structure) of a P system into another configuration, by means of a given set of rules acting both on the membranes and on the multisets of objects. Although such a transformation can be obtained during a computation of a P system, we consider it as a goal per se, as a pre-computation phase, when the system itself is built. In this framework, several important topics appear, such as the edit-distance be- tween configurations (with respect to a given set of editing rules; actually, this is a weak metric, because it is not necessarily symmetric), normal forms, reachability, existence of single configurations from which a given family of configurations can be constructed, etc. We investigate here only a few of these questions; the paper is mainly devoted to formulating problems in the new framework, calling attention to the possible extensions and usefulness of the present approach.