Constitutes the refereed extended postproceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Membrane Computing, held in Italy, in June 2004. This book addresses various topics in the area of membrane computing, ranging from mathematics and theoretical computer science to applications in biology, linguistics, and computer graphics.

The theoretical basis of membrane computing was established in the early 2000s with fundamental research into the computational power, complexity aspects and relationships with other (un)conventional computing paradigms. Although this core theoretical research has continued to grow rapidly and vigorously, another area of investigation has since been added, focusing on the applications of this model in many areas, most prominently in systems and synthetic biology, engineering optimization, power system fault diagnosis and mobile robot controller design. The further development of these...