Abstract
<p>In order to design new search strategies for collaborating autonomous underwater vehicles, a novel simulator was developed to model the diffusion of groundwater discharge in shallow coastal waters. The simulation allows for the evaluation of new search strategies without running the risk of losing expensive hardware during the field testing. The developed simulation is based on cellular automata. In order to reduce computational complexity, a novel two-dimensional cellular automaton with additional depth-information for each cell is used to simulate a three-dimensional nearshore environment. The influence of different neighbourhoods and cell shapes on the behaviour of the cellular automaton is examined and discussed. Results show a faster rise of discharged fluorescent dissolved organic matter for hexagon cells. Also all examined neighbourhoods converge to a stable state after a finite number of iterations. <br></p>