This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 22nd IFIP WG 1.5 International Workshop on Cellular Automata and Discrete Complex Systems, AUTOMATA 2016, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in June 2016. This volume contains 3 invited talks in full-paper length and 12 regular papers, which were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 23 submissions. The papers feature research on all fundamental aspects of cellular automata and related discrete complex systems and deal with the following topics: dynamical, topological, ergodic and algebraic aspects; algorithmic and complexity issues; emergent properties; formal language processing; symbolic dynamics; models of parallelism and distributed systems; timing schemes; phenomenological descriptions; scientific modeling; and practical applications.