VECTOR CELLULAR AUTOMATA BASED GEOGRAPHICAL ENTITY

Cellular automata (CA) are simple mathematical systems that exhibit very complicated behaviour. The integration of GIS and CA shows tremendous capability in simulating spatio-temporal dynamic process in geography world. But standard CA has some restrictions in cellular shape, spatial resolution, precision, quantity, neighbor and rule，which restrict the CA’s abilities of simulating real world and other applications. This paper discusses the relation between geography phenomenon and cellular automata, extends the constitutes of standard CA such as cell and states, neighborhoods, local transition rule and discrete time and so on, and builds a extended CA model based on geographical entity in irregular geographical spaces, where cells are no longer regular tessellations, and cellular neighborhoods vary from place to place, and are no longer based on physically adjacent cells. In addition, a general integrated framework of GIS and vector cellular automata based geographical entity (VCA) is brought forward in the paper.