The cellular automata formalism and its relationship to DEVS
Hans Vangheluwe, Ghislain C. Vansteenkiste · 2000
Cellular automata (CA) were originally conceived by Ulam and von Neumann in the 1940s to provide a formal framework for investigating the behaviour of complex, spatially distributed systems. Cellular Automata constitute a dynamic, discrete space, discrete time formalism where space is usually discretized in a grid of cells. Cellular automata are still used to study, from first principles, the behaviour of a plethora of systems. The Discrete EVent system Specification (DEVS) was first introduced by Zeigler in 1976 as a rigourous basis for discrete-event modelling. At the discrete-event level of abstraction, state variables are considered to change only at event-times. Furthermore, the number of events occurring in a bounded time-interval must be finite. The semantics