Cellular automata and its application to engineering problems - A new paradigm for dynamic system modeling

This paper proposes a new technique for dynamic system modeling by Cellular Automata(CA). CA is a discrete modeling procedure of information flow, and has been applied to various problems in engineering field since the beginning of 1970s. The applications of CA include Lattice Gas Automata in numerical fluid engineering, Petri-net modeling in graph theory, Lindenmayer system in biology, and multi-agent modeling in robotics engineering and other fields. The general idea of modeling a system by CA is described first in this paper, and several applications of two-dimensional CA to engineering problems such as pattern formation of granular materials, advection-diffusion problems, and passenger flow modeling in a hall. Through these modeling procedures, CA is revealed as a more universal modeling technique than partial differential equations which have been considered as one of the most popular and the most effective method in modeling physical phenomena.