Solving Satisfiability Problems with Membrane Algorithms

This paper presents the application of membrane algorithms to satisfiability problems which are well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. The membrane algorithm, called QEPS, is a combination of P system approaches and quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithms. QEPS employs the hierarchical structure of the compartments of P systems, the objects consisting of quantum-inspired bit individuals, the rules composed of quantum-inspired gate evolutionary rules and transformation/communication-like rules in P systems to specify the membrane algorithms. A large number of experiments carried out on bench satisfiability problems show that QEPS performs better than its counterpart quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm.