%0 Book Section %B Applications of Membrane Computing in Systems and Synthetic Biology %D 2014 %T Membrane System-Based Models for Specifying Dynamical Population Systems %A M. Angels Colomer %A Manuel García-Quismondo %A Luis F. Macías-Ramos %A Miguel A. Martínez-del-Amor %A Ignacio Pérez-Hurtado %A Mario J. Pérez-Jiménez %A Agustín Riscos-Núñez %A Luis Valencia-Cabrera %C Amsterdam, the Netherlands %I Springer Verlag %P 97-132 %S Emergence, Complexity and Computation %U http://www.springer.com/engineering/computational+intelligence+and+complexity/book/978-3-319-03190-3 %V 7 %X Population Dynamics P systems (PDP systems, in short) provide a new formal bio-inspired modelling framework, which has been successfully used for modelling population dynamics on real ecosystems. The semantics of these systems is captured by the Direct distribution based on Consistent Blocks Algorithm (DCBA), which has been engineered into software simulation tools. In particular,MeCoSim (Membrane Computing Simulator) is a GUI developed in the framework ofP-Lingua that can be used as a simulation environment for running virtual experiments. The parameters of each scenario to be simulated can be easily adjusted in a visual way, as well as the settings for the desired output format, thus facilitating the validation %8 12/2013