Cellular automata as a mesoscopic approach to model and simulate complex systems

Abstract

We discuss the cellular automata approach and its extensions, the lattice Boltzmann and multiparticle methods. The potential of these techniques is demonstrated in the case of modeling complex systems. In particular, we consider simple applications taken from various scientific domains. We discuss our distributed particle simulation of flow, based on a parallel lattice Boltzmann Method. Efficient parallel execution is possible, provided that (dynamic) load balancing techniques are applied. Next, we present a number of case studies of flow in complex geometry, i.e. flow in porous media and in static mixer reactors.