Translating Discrete Multi-Agents Systems into Cellular Automata: Application to Diffusion-Limited Aggregation

Abstract. This paper deals with the synchronous implementation of situated Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in order to have no execution bias and to ease their programming on massively parallel computing devices. For this purpose we in-vestigate the translation of discrete MAS into Cellular Automata (CA). Contrarily to the sequential scheduling generally used in MAS simulations, CA are a model for massively parallel computing where the updating of the components is syn-chronous. However, CA expressiveness is limited and not always adapted to all types of modeling situations, especially when independent entities move in space. After illustrating these issues on a simple example, we propose a generic method to translate a discrete MAS into a CA, called a transactional CA. Our approach consists in using the influence-reaction model to perform this translation.