A General Computational Formalism for Networks of Structured Grids

Extended Cellular Automata (XCA) represent one of the most known parallel computational paradigm for the modeling and simulation of complex systems on stenciled structured grids. However, the formalism does not perfectly lend itself to the modeling of multiple automata were two or more models co-evolve by interchanging information and by synchronizing during the dynamic evolution of the system. Here we propose the Extended Cellular Automata Network (XCAN) formalism, an extension of the original XCA paradigm in which different automata are described by means of a graph, with vertices representing automata and inter-relations modeled by a set of edges. The formalism is applied to the modeling of a theoretical 2D/3D coupled system, where space/time variance and synchronization aspects are pointed out.