An Architecture for the Integration of Different Functional and Structural Plant Models

TL;DR

This paper proposes a flexible, architecture-based approach for integrating diverse Functional Structural Plant Models (FSPMs) to overcome individual model limitations, demonstrated through a practical implementation and testing.

Contribution

It introduces a generic architecture combining ETL and client/server components for integrating different FSPMs across platforms, addressing technical challenges.

Findings

Successful implementation of the architecture for two FSPMs

Effective integration demonstrated through multiple tests

Enhanced flexibility in combining different plant models

Abstract

Plant scientists use Functional Structural Plant Models (FSPMs) to model plant systems within a limited space-time range. To allow FSPMs to abstract complex plant systems beyond a single model's limitation, an integration that compounds different FSPMs could be a possible solution. However, the integration involves many technical dimensions and a generic software infrastructure for all integration cases is not possible. In this paper, we analyze the requirements of the integration with all the technical dimensions. Instead of an infrastructure, we propose a generic architecture with specific process-related components as a logical level solution by combining an ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) based sub architecture and a C/S (Client/Server) based sub architecture. This allows the integration of different FSP models hosted on the same and different FSP modeling platforms in a flexible way. We demonstrate the usability of the architecture by the implementation of a full infrastructure for the integration of two specific FSPMs, and we illustrate the effectiveness of the infrastructure by several integrative tests.