Abstract
We bring together two topics recently introduced in membrane computing, the much investigated spiking neural P systems (in short, SN P systems), inspired from the way the neurons communicate through spikes, and the dP systems (distributed P systems, with components which “read” strings from the environment and then cooperate in accepting their concatenation). The goal is to introduce SN dP systems, and to this aim we first introduce SN P systems with the possibility to input, at their request, spikes from the environment; this is done by so-called request rules. A preliminary investigation of the obtained SN dP systems (they can also be called automata) is carried out. As expected, request rules are useful, while the distribution in terms of dP systems can handle languages which cannot be generated by usual SN P systems. We always work with extended SN P systems; the non-extended case, as well as several other natural questions remain open.