Evolutionary game theory in a cell: A membrane computing approach

Evolutionary Game Theory studies the spreading of strategies in populations. An important question of the area concerns the possibility that certain population structures can facilitate the spreading of more cooperative behaviours associated to the sustainability and resilience of many different systems ranging from ecological to socio-economic systems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to study the spreading of behaviours in structured populations by combining Evolutionary Game Theory and membrane computing. We show that there is a general way to encode Evolutionary Game Theory into membrane computing, leading to a novel computational framework which can be used to study, analyze and simulate the spreading of behaviours in structured populations organized in communicating compartments. The proposed approach allows to extend the works on membrane systems, population and ecological dynamics, and, at the same time, suggests a novel bioinspired framework, based on formal languages theory, to investigate the dynamics of evolving structured populations. (C) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.