Research Group on Natural Computing

Spiking neural P systems (SN P systems, for short) are a class of distributed
parallel computing devices inspired from the way neurons communicate by means of
spikes. Asynchronous SN P systems are non-synchronized systems, where the use of spik-
ing rules (even if they are enabled by the contents of neurons) is not obligatory. In this
paper, with a biological inspiration (in order to achieve some specic biological func-
tioning, neurons from the same functioning motif or community work synchronously to
cooperate with each other), we introduce the notion of local synchronization into asyn-
chronous SN P systems. The computation power of asynchronous SN P systems with
local synchronization is investigated. Such systems consisting of general neurons (resp.
unbounded neurons) and using standard spiking rules are proved to be universal. Asyn-
chronous SN P systems with local synchronization consisting of bounded neurons and
using standard spiking rules characterize the semilinear sets of natural numbers. These
results show that the local synchronization is useful, it provides some \programming
capacity" useful for achieving a desired computational power.