Spiking neural P systems are a class of distributed parallel computing models, inspired by the way in which neurons process information and communicate with each other by means of spikes. In 2007, Freund and Verlan developed a formal framework for P systems to capture most of the essential features of P systems and to define their functioning in a formal way. In this work, we present an extension of the formal framework related to spiking neural P systems by considering the applicability of each rule to be controlled by specific conditions on the current contents of the cells. The main objective of this extension is to also capture spiking neural P systems in the formal framework. Another goal of our extension is to incorporate the notions of input and output. Finally, we also show that in the case of spiking neural P systems, the rules have a rather simple form and in that way spiking neural P systems correspond to vector addition systems where the application of rules is controlled by semi-linear sets.

In this article, we consider the operations of insertion and deletion working in a graph-controlled manner. We show that like in the case of context-free productions, the computational power is strictly increased when using a control graph: computational completeness can be obtained by systems with insertion or deletion rules involving at most two symbols in a contextual or in a context-free manner and with the control graph having only four nodes.Comment: In Proceedings DCFS 2010, arXiv:1008.127