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Despite their relevance for both theoretical and application scenarios, the design and the identification of P\u00a0systems remain tedious and demanding tasks, requiring considerable time and expertise. In this work, we try to address these problems by proposing an automated methodology based on grammatical evolution (GE)\u2014an evolutionary computation technique\u2014which does not require any domain knowledge. We consider a setting where observations of successive configurations of a P\u00a0system are available, and we rely on GE for automatically inferring the P\u00a0system, i.e., its ruleset. Such approach directly addresses the identification problem, but it can also be employed for automated design, requiring the designer to simply express the configurations of the P\u00a0system rather than its full ruleset. We assess the practicability of the proposed method on six problems of various difficulties and evaluate its behavior in terms of inference capability and time consumption. Experimental results confirm our approach is a viable strategy for small problem sizes, where it achieves perfect inference in a few seconds without any human intervention. Moreover, we also obtain promising results for larger problem sizes in a human-aided context, paving the way for fully or partially automated design of P\u00a0systems.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1007\/s41965-023-00125-w","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,8,10]],"date-time":"2023-08-10T20:28:19Z","timestamp":1691699299000},"page":"129-143","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":9,"title":["A grammatical evolution approach to the automatic inference of P\u00a0systems"],"prefix":"10.1007","volume":"5","author":[{"given":"Giorgia","family":"Nadizar","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Gloria","family":"Pietropolli","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,8,10]]},"reference":[{"issue":"1","key":"125_CR1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"73","DOI":"10.1016\/S0304-3975(02)00136-6","volume":"287","author":"G P\u0103un","year":"2002","unstructured":"P\u0103un, G., & Rozenberg, G. 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