Bringing together scholars and students from different fields, the 24th Annual International Workshop on Cellular Automata (CAs) and Discrete Complex Systems (DCSs) AUTOMATA 2018 will convene June 20-22. This edition will take place in Ghent, Belgium and is organized by the Research Unit Knowledge-based Systems of the Department of Mathematical Modelling, Statistics and Bioinformatics of Ghent University.

Catalysed by the growing data availability and the ever rising computing power, the advents of CAs and DCSs are becoming increasingly appreciated in many fields of computer science, and the environmental, physical and biological sciences. This follows from their intrinsic simplicity while nonetheless allowing the description of complex environmental, physical and biological processes, as opposed to more established modelling paradigms. For these reasons, they are used extensively in population biology, geography, materials science, and so on. It is a dynamic field in both theory and applications.

The purpose of this conference is to highlight the major advances in the field and the development of new tools, to support the development of theory and applications of CA and DCS and to identify and study within an inter- and multidisciplinary context, the important fundamental aspects, concepts, notions and problems concerning CA and DCS.

Recent versions of the workshop took place in Milan, Italy (2017), Zurich, Switzerland (2016), Turku, Finland (2015) and Himeji, Japan (2014). The AUTOMATA series is the official annual event of IFIP WG 1.5 the Working Group 5 (on Cellular Automata and Discrete Complex Systems), of the Technical Committee 1 (on Foundations of Computer Science), of the International Federation of Information Processing.