Tissue P systems are a class of distributed and parallel computing models investigated in membrane computing, which are inspired from the structure and functioning of communication cells in tissues. Such systems with cell division (corresponding to the mitosis behavior of living cells) can theoretically generate exponential working space in linear time, therefore providing a possible way to solve computational hard problems in feasible time by a space-time trade-off. In this work, we construct

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... family of tissue P systems with cell division to solve the vertex cover problems, and achieve a linear time solution (with respect to the size of the problems). Furthermore, we prove that the systems are constructed in a uniform manner and work in a confluent way.