MP Systems and Hybrid Petri Nets

Metabolic P systems are a special class of P systems developed to model dynamics of biological phenomena related to metabolism and signaling transduction in the living cell. The main target of this model is to give an intuitive representation of biochemical pathways in order to facilitate the understanding of biological mechanisms. A new notation of MP graphs [16] will be defined as a graphical representation of MP systems and the graphical user interface we devised to draw MP graphs while working with our MP simulator Psim [4] will be described. We will propose also a comparison between MP systems and Hybrid Functional Petri Nets (HFPN) [19], which are an extension of Petri nets for biopathways simulation, to highlight several similarities between the two formalisms. Finally, a definition of equivalence between MP systems and HFPN will conclude the paper.