Finite state based testing of P systems

In this paper, we propose an approach to P system testing based on finite state machine conformance techniques. Of the many variants of P systems that have been defined, we consider cell-like P systems which use non-cooperative transformation and communication rules. We show that a (minimal) deterministic finite cover automaton (DFCA) (a finite automaton that accepts all words in a given finite language, but can also accept words that are longer than any word in the language) provides the right approximation for the computation of a P system. Furthermore, we provide a procedure for generating test sets directly from the P system specification (without explicitly constructing the minimal DFCA model).