Consolidating the GroIMP plant modelling platform - documentation, user-interface update, parallelization

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Winfried Kurth
• Subject Area: Plant Breeding and Plant Pathology ; Forestry ; Plant Cultivation, Plant Nutrition, Agricultural Technology ; Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 443187692

GroIMP stands for "Growth-grammar related Interactive Modelling Platform" and serves for simulating scenarios of structurally-explicit, physiology-based vegetation growth and develop-ment. Thus, it is a platform for specifying and running functional-structural plant models (FSPMs), also called "virtual plants". It employs the rule-based language XL (eXtended L-system language) which is an extension of Java and enables the execution of parallel graph grammars. Attributed graphs are the used data structures for plant architecture and function. The core of the software was implemented by Ole Kniemeyer in 2008. Since then it has been used in several international projects, but usage is limited by a missing documentation, a user interface which does not adhere to current standards, and some lack of interfacing and of distributed and parallel computing, which would be necessary to do simulations of larger groups of plants. The software shall be enhanced in these points, and a user-and-developer board shall be founded to ensure a sustainable further development of the software also after the project has finished. The board will then cooperate with the system administrator of the applicant's department.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Reinhold Meyer