Regional Control of Boolean Cellular Automata

An interesting problem in extended physical systems is that of the regional control, i.e., how to add a suitable control at the boundary or inside a region of interest so that the state of such region is near to a desired one. Many physical problems are modelled by means of cellular automata. It is therefore important to port control concepts to this discrete world. In this paper we address the problem of regional controllability of cellular automata via boundary actions, i.e., we investigate the characteristics of a cellular automaton rule so that it can be controlled inside a given region only acting on the value of sites at its boundaries.