Incorporating Graph Automata into Plant Growth Simulation with Nutrients Transport

Abstract

In this paper we model the growth of living plants in a discrete approach, the graph automata based plant model representing each metamer of the plant as node of the automata. The allocation and transport of carbon, water and nitrogen among metamers, as an emergent property, resulted from the strategy of local pressure equilibrium between adjacent neighbors using discrete pressure-flow kinetics which were found to be suitable to describe mass flow in discrete space. Simulation results show that the graph automata based parallel approach can deal with carbon transport and allocation effectively.