Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) signed a contract with Zhejiang Tengtou Landscape Ltd. recently. The joint research project on modeling and computational experiments of landscape trees based on ACP theory started. This indicates that the theory of parallel system (Artifical system, Computational experiment,Parallel management, ACP) from CASIA is employed in the filed of agriculture for the first time.
Zhejiang Tengtou Landscape Ltd., the party in request for this technology, is a large landscape enterprise with 25000 mus of nursery and onws nursery base in major provinces around China. As the size of the enterprise increases rapidly, Zhejiang Tengtou Landscape Ltd. faces a task to develop fine landscape management with computational and quantized management instead of traditional empirical management in order to keep its leading role in Chinese landscape enterprises.
Oriented to this need, CASIA proposes the landscape plant growth model and computational experiment solution based on theory of parallel system, with two advantages. On one hand, CASIA has accumulated very much experience and technology in the field of plant function and structure modeling in more than ten years of Chinese-French joint research. CASIA developed a general software for plant growth simulation and visualization. The plant modeling theory named GreenLab in the general software, which is developed from AMAP modeling methods, is utilized to construct a library of hundreds of trees in a proprietary software of the same name. On the other hand, CASIA proposed the theory of parallel system for controlling complex systems. The theory has been successfully employed in many fields including transportation management and petroleum chemical enterprise management. The theory of parallel system includes three levels, Artificial system, Computational experiment and Parallel management. The plant growth model is a part of Arificial system.
Through communication and survey in the initial period, researchers find that nursery management has long production period and rely on personal experience. Computational experiment based on plant growth model can provide a management plan according to plants' age and nursery characteristics comprehensively. It can also provide a rapid, quantitative and repeatable experiment method. Thus plant growth managers can make dicisions accordingly.
This agricultural production system includes three factors, plant, environment and management, which all variate dynamically both in time and space. The parallel management, which manages agricultural production according to data from real-time sensing, converts management experience to knowledge which can be understood and expressed by computer and get decisions based on computational experiments. As the land resource becomes rare, environmental controllable production system develops and human need for high quality agricultural production increases, the theory of parallel system will be applied more broadly in the field of agriculture.