Solving the Factorization Problem with P Systems

P systems have been used many times to face with computationally difficult problems, such as NP–complete decision problems and NP–hard optimization problems. In this paper we focus our attention on another computationally intractable problem: Factorization. In particular, we first propose a simple method to encode binary numbers using multisets. Then, we describe three families of P systems: the first two allow to add and to multiply two binary encoded numbers, respectively, and the third solves the Factorization problem.