Modeling membrane systems using colored stochastic Petri nets

Membrane systems are a very powerful computational modeling language inspired by the internal organization of living cells. In this paper we explore the use of colored stochastic Petri nets to model an attractive variant of membrane systems—stochastic membrane systems with active membranes. In our approach, each object is modeled as a place and each membrane as a color. As a result, we can easily represent large-scale membrane systems as compact colored Petri nets. Moreover, using dynamic color sets, we can conveniently model membrane systems with active membranes. We take the virus infection process as an example to illustrate our approach. Our paper demonstrates that colored Petri nets with dynamic color sets are a compelling tool for representing and analyzing dynamic membrane systems, and thus do contribute to the description and analysis of their dynamic behavior.