Proceedings Fourth Workshop on Membrane Computing and Biologically Inspired Process Calculi 2010

The 4th Workshop on Membrane Computing and Biologically Inspired Process Calculi (MeCBIC 2010) is organized in Jena as a satellite event of the Eleventh International Conference on Membrane Computing (CMC11). Biological membranes play a fundamental role in the complex reactions which take place in cells of living organisms. The importance of this role has been considered in two different types of formalisms introduced recently. Membrane systems were introduced as a class of distributed parallel computing devices inspired by the observation that any biological system is a complex hierarchical structure, with a flow of biochemical substances and information that underlies their functioning. The modeling and analysis of biological systems has also attracted considerable interest of the process algebra research community. Thus the notions of membranes and compartments have been explicitly represented in a family of calculi, such as ambients and brane calculi. A cross fertilization of these two research areas has recently started. A deeper investigation of the relationships between these related formalisms is interesting, as it is important to understand the crucial similarities and the differences. The main aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on membrane computing, in biologically inspired process calculi, and in other related fields, in order to present recent results and to discuss new ideas concerning such formalisms, their properties and relationships.