Cell-DEVS/GDEVS for complex continuous systems

The Cell-Discrete Event System Specification (Cell-DEVS) formalism allows defining asynchronous cell spaces with explicit timing delays (based on the specifications of the DEVS formalism). The authors used Cell-DEVS to solve different applications and go one step further in the definition of complex continuous systems by combining Cell-DEVS and Generalized DEVS (GDEVS). They focus on a model describing the electrical behavior of the heart tissue, as previous research in this field has thoroughly studied this problem using differential equations and cellular automata. The authors show that they can provide adequate levels of precision at a fraction of the computing cost of differential equations. Their thesis is that the use of the GDEVS formalism is perfectly suited to attack problems such as this one, improving complex systems analysis. The authors show that their approach permits making models easily extensible to provide different actions in different cells while not affecting performance.