Recent complexity-theoretic results on P systems with active membranes

Membrane systems, also called P systems, are an interesting class of parallel and distributed models of computation inspired by cell biology. They have been thoroughly investigated in the literature, both from the theoretical standpoint - analysing their computing power and efficiency - and as tools to model natural phenomena. In this article, we focus on the complexity theory of P systems with active membranes, a variant of P systems where the membranes themselves affect the applicability of rules and change (both in number and structurally) during computations. We summarize the main results on their space complexity, and describe some recent improvements related to time complexity, proved via a few general proof techniques.