M.H Afshar - Associate professor, School of Civil Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, P.O.۱۶۷۶۵-۱۶۳, Narmak, Tehran, Iran
M. Khadem - Ms Student, School of Civil Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, P.O. ۱۶۷۶۵-۱۶۳,Narmak, Tehran, Iran

The present paper describes the implementation of a two-dimensional (2D) Cellular Automata (CA) for solving groundwater problems. The basic elements of CA algorithm such as updating rule, definition of cells and its neighbors are first explained. The updating rule is obtained by discretization of the groundwater governing equation and each node generated by domain discretization is used as a CA cell. The method is tested against a hypothetical aquifer problem indicating excellent performance in comparison to the existing Finite Difference Method (FDM). In addition, one of the most significant advantages of the employed CA algorithm over the conventional FDM is that it can produce the same results with lower computational costs especially in large scale problems. The results show the proposed method can be used as an efficient and powerful approach for simulating complicated groundwater problems with arbitrary boundary conditions.

automata, Finite difference method, Confined aquifer, piezometric head