摘要：

The aim of this paper is to introduce to the reader a new class of distributed computing models, inspired from biochemistry, the super-cell systems (P systems, for short). Several cells, each of them delimited by a membrane, are hierarchically embedded in a unique skin membrane. Each cell contains objects and evolution rules for these objects. What we obtain is called a super-cell. The rules are applied in parallel to the objects placed in the same region of the super-cell. The result of a computation is either collected in a designated membrane or it is the (partially ordered) sequence of objects which exit the system. In this way, we obtain a mechanism which generates a set of numbers, of number relations, or a language, depending on the variant we work with. We informally define these systems, illustrate the definitions by examples, survey the basic results from a previous paper of the author, where these systems were proposed, and from papers of I. Petre and the author, G. Rozenberg and A. Salomaa, and we list a series of research topics and open problems which naturally arise in this framework.

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