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Bond computing systems: a biologically inspired and high-level dynamics model for pervasive computing

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Abstract

Targeting at modeling the high-level dynamics of pervasive computing systems, we introduce bond computing systems (BCS) consisting of objects, bonds and rules. Objects are typed but addressless representations of physical or logical (computing and communicating) entities. Bonds are typed multisets of objects. In a BCS, a configuration is specified by a multiset of bonds, called a collection. Rules specify how a collection evolves to a new one. A BCS is a variation of a P system introduced by Gheorghe Paun where, roughly, there is no maximal parallelism but with typed and unbounded number of membranes, and hence, our model is also biologically inspired. In this paper, we focus on regular bond computing systems (RBCS), where bond types are regular, and study their computation power and verification problems. Among other results, we show that the computing power of RBCS lies between linearly bounded automata (LBA) and LBC (a form of bounded multicounter machines) and hence, the regular bond-type reachability problem (given an RBCS, whether there is some initial collection that can reach some collection containing a bond of a given regular type) is undecidable. We also study a restricted model (namely, B-boundedness) of RBCS where the reachability problem becomes decidable.

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Acknowledgements

The work by Linmin Yang and Zhe Dang was supported in part by NSF Grant CCF-0430531. The work by Oscar H. Ibarra was supported in part by NSF Grant CCF-0430945 and CCF-0524136.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, 99164, USA

    Linmin Yang & Zhe Dang

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA

    Oscar H. Ibarra

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  1. Linmin Yang
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  2. Zhe Dang
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  3. Oscar H. Ibarra
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Correspondence to Linmin Yang.

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Yang, L., Dang, Z. & Ibarra, O.H. Bond computing systems: a biologically inspired and high-level dynamics model for pervasive computing. Nat Comput 9, 347–364 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11047-009-9134-z

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