Author Description

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed extended postproceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Membrane Computing, WMC 2004, held in Milan, Italy in June 2004. The 20 revised full papers presented together with 6 invited papers went through two rounds of reviewing and improvement. All current topics in the area of membrane computing are addressed, ranging from mathematics and theoretical computer science to applications in biology, linguistics, and computer graphics. Issues related to computational power and complexity classes, new classes of P systems, fuzzy approaches, and reversibility and energy consumption are dealt with as well.