Using well-structured transition systems to decide divergence for catalytic P systems

P systems are a biologically inspired model introduced by Gheorghe Păun with the aim of representing the structure and the functioning of the cell. Since their introduction, several variants of P systems have been proposed and explored.We concentrate on the class of catalytic P systems without priorities associated with the rules. We show that the theory of Well-Structured Transition Systems can be used to decide the divergence problem (i.e. checking for the existence of an infinite computation) for such a class of P systems.As a corollary, we obtain an alternative proof of the nonuniversality of deterministic catalytic P systems, an open problem recently solved by Ibarra and Yen.