Cellular Automaton Simulations for Target Waves in Excitable Media

Abstract

Using the Greenberg–Hasting cellular automata model, we study the properties of target waves in excitable media under the no-flux boundary conditions. For the system has only one excited state, the computer simulation and analysis lead to the conclusions that, the number of refractory states does not influence the wave-front speed; the wave-front speed decreases as the excitation threshold increases and increases as the neighbor radius increases; the period of target waves is equal to the number of cell states; the excitation condition for target waves is that the wave-front speed must be bigger than half of the neighbor radius.