Modeling Development Processes in MGS

Abstract

Biology has long inspired unconventional models of computation to computer scientists. This chapter focuses on a model inspired by biological development both at the molecular and cellular levels. Such biological processes are particularly interesting for computer science because the dynamic organization emerges from many decentralized and local interactions that occur concurrently at several time and space scales. Thus, they provide a source of inspiration to solve various problems related to mobility, distributed systems, open systems, etc. The fundamental mechanisms of biological development are now understood as changes within a complex dynamical system. This chapter advocates that these fundamental mechanisms, although mainly developed in a continuous framework, can be rephrased in a discrete setting relying on the notion of rewriting in a topological setting. The discrete formulation is as formal as the continuous one, enables the simulation, and opens a way to the systematic study of the behavioral properties of the biological systems. Directly inspired from these developmental processes, the chapter presents an experimental programming language called MGS. MGS is dedicated to the modeling and simulation of dynamical systems with dynamical structures. The chapter illustrates the basic notions of MGS through several algorithmic examples and by sketching various biological models.