Theoretical Computer Science
Reset Nets Between Decidability and Undecidability
ICALP '98 Proceedings of the 25th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming
The Decidability of Model Checking Mobile Ambients
CSL '01 Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Computer Science Logic
Theoretical Computer Science - Special issue: Computational systems biology
BioAmbients: an abstraction for biological compartments
Theoretical Computer Science - Special issue: Computational systems biology
On the computational strength of pure ambient calculi
Theoretical Computer Science - Expressiveness in concurrency
When ambients cannot be opened
Theoretical Computer Science - Foundations of software science and computation structures
On Reachability and Spatial Reachability in Fragments of BioAmbients
Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)
Reachability Analysis in BioAmbients
Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)
Deciding Reachability in Mobile Ambients with Name Restriction
Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)
Turing Completeness Using Three Mobile Membranes
UC '09 Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Unconventional Computation
The κ-Lattice: Decidability Boundaries for Qualitative Analysis in Biological Languages
CMSB '09 Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computational Methods in Systems Biology
Deciding reachability problems in turing-complete fragments of mobile ambients
Mathematical Structures in Computer Science
On the reachability problem in P systems with mobile membranes
WMC'07 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Membrane computing
On the verification of membrane systems with dynamic structure
Natural Computing: an international journal
Reachability analysis in boxed ambients
ICTCS'05 Proceedings of the 9th Italian conference on Theoretical Computer Science
Deciding reachability in mobile ambients
ESOP'05 Proceedings of the 14th European conference on Programming Languages and Systems
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BioAmbients (BA) is a powerful model for representing various aspects of living cells. The model provides a rich set of operations for the movement and interaction of molecules. The richness of the language motivates the study of fragments of the full model and comparison with other computational models. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the merge capability, used for fusing the contents of two sibling ambients, on the decidability of two reachability problems called Target and Spatial Reachability. By enhancing techniques-based on the theory of Petri nets-already used in the context of Mobile Ambients, we prove that both Target and Spatial Reachability are decidable for a Turing-complete fragment of BA without merge. Then we extend this fragment with a limited form of merge, that does not reduce the total number of ambients: in this fragment Target Reachability is no longer decidable, but by resorting to the theory of Petri nets with transfer arcs we prove that at least Spatial Reachability is decidable. Finally, we show that if we consider the standard merge capability then both reachability problems turn out to be undecidable. Besides characterizing the power of merge, the proof techniques that we use also establish an interesting connection between BA and other computational models like standard Petri nets, their extension with transfer arcs, and Two Counter Machines.