Document Oriented Modeling of Cellular Automata

This paper proposes a document-oriented modeling concept for cellular automata (CA), which supports the simple and rapid design of a huge variety of cellular automata. This modeling concept is realized as a domain-specific modeling language derived from XML (eXtensible Markup Language). XML is in general considered as the future for internet documents and data exchange. The main concept behind XML is to separate the content of a document from its layout (its appearance). The presented modeling concept uses a document for describing a whole cellular automaton. Like the content of a document is separated from its layout, the abstract cellular automaton is separated from a concrete implementation and programming language. Everyone can create and use XSL(T) stylesheets for translating cellular-automaton-documents into ready to use source-code (covering the adequate cellular-automaton-functionality) as well as for documentation and exchange of the realised CA.