A Conceptual Framework for Multi-scale Cellular Modeling of Spatial Change

The use of cellular models for simulating spatial change phenomena has been a subject of intensive theoretical and applied research for the last two decades. This type of models was developed during the 1940s to devise mathematical rules for the evolution of biological systems. They were introduced in urban geography by Waldo Tobler in the 1970s because of their spatial structure and their ability for describing complex behaviors from sets of simple rules. The research effort made since then led to many different spatial change cellular models, some of which are being applied in practice. However, these models are based on a single-scale approach, since they focus on metropolitan or urban areas. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework for