A cellular automata-ready GIS infrastructure for geosimulation and territorial analysis

This paper presents an integrated GIS and cellular automata (CA) modelling and simulation environment. We hold that several concurrent facts offer the necessary critical mass to foster the development of robust and scalable general-purpose CA-modelling tools that go beyond demonstrative proof-of-concept status, allowing thus fully operational modelling and simulation of real-world territorial systems. Among these facts, we can mention the entering of the CA-based geosimulation modelling in its age of maturity, the growing computational capabilities of nowadays computers, the consolidation of general-purpose as well as specialised GIS-based geo-analysis methodologies and their availability as open-source libraries and applications. The environment hereby described is an example of a way to obtain such robust and general-purpose CA-modelling tool-box. Its main characteristics are (1) tight interoperability between GIS and CAs, (2) a sufficiently generalised and flexible underlying CA meta-model allowing for the implementation of a variety of types of CA models, (3) computationally efficiency and (4) user-friendliness. We furthermore present two test case applications to illustrate a standard operational modelling workflow within this simulation environment and to briefly illustrate its look-and-feel. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.