A network of cellular automata for a landslide simulation

Cellular Automata (CA) offer a promising computational model to simulate complex phenomena that are characterized by different coupled parameters that account for the interactions of their different components. In this paper we present the Cellular Automata Network (CAN) computational model and its application to the simulation of debris/flow phenomena. We carried out some experimentations developing a CAN application that implements the SCIDDICA model (Simulation through Computational Innovative methods for the Detection of Debris flow path using Interactive Cellular Automatamodel), tested on the landslide occurred in Sarno (Italy) in 1998. CAN model allows to represent each component of a physical system in terms of cellular automata, and the interactions among these components in terms of a network of cellular automata. The adoption of the CAN model allows to exploit two different types of parallelism: the data parallelism that comes from the use of Cellular Automata classical model, and the task parallelism that could occur introducing the network of Cellular Automata.