Abstract

A cellular automaton is a decentralized computing model providing an excellent platform for performing complex computation with the help of only local information. Researchers, scientists and practitioners from different fields have exploited the CA paradigm of local information, decentralized control and universal computation for modeling different applications. This article provides a survey of available literature of some of the methodologies employed by researchers to utilize cellular automata for modeling purposes. The survey introduces the different types of cellular automata being used for modeling and the analytical methods used to predict its global behavior from its local configurations. It further gives a detailed sketch of the efforts undertaken to configure the local settings of CA from a given global situation; the problem which has been traditionally termed as the inverse problem. Finally, it presents the different fields in which CA have been applied. The extensive bibliography provided with the article will be of help to the new entrant as well as researchers working in this field.

Citations