The development of a computational environment for cellular automata

In this paper, we introduce and describe the computational environment, which we have developed in this study, for cellular automata (CA). CA is a powerful method to understand and simulate the behavior of complex systems such as traffic jams, fluid crosscurrents, and natural disasters. In CA method, modeling of such a system or a phenomenon is to define a transition function, which determines local interactions, so-called "CA rules." However, the systematic method for design of CA rules has been unestablished. We require a CA simulator for "trial and error" in study of modeling based on CA. Furthermore, the CA simulation environment that does not require special knowledge of a user for parallel processing is desired. The purpose of this study is to develop a comprehensive system that enables to expedite the design of local rules and to accelerate simulations. We have implemented two kinds of simulators differing by their characteristics to realize improvement both design efficiency and execution speed. The major difference between the two simulators is whether a source code is compiled or not. The source code is described in DORA language the authors have designed for the system. DORA language is designed for describing CA rules simply.