Chapter 19
The Optimum Plant
Plant, a Natural Body that has a vegetable Soul.
[1696 Phillips (ed. 5)]
19.1 Optimum Plant Model
Just describing or simulating the change in living organisms may simply not be
good enough. We all want ultimately to predict what these organisms would do
under prescribed circumstances. Scientists interested in predictions first need a
good description of the behavior of the living organism. Toward that end, they
frequently find it advantageous to set up optimality hypotheses of the organism’s
behavior and then compare the optimization results with results of experiments on
the actual dynamics of the organism.
The work begun by Cohen in 1971 on the optimization of plants makes a good
example of this kind of approach [1]. A good summary is provided in Roughgarden
[2]. Cohen’s model is the simplest model possible of optimal control in plants. The
basic hypothesis is that this plant strives to produce the maximum reproductive
biomass by the end of the growing season, a period that is T units long. We assume
that the plant is genetically “wired” for this growing season, i.e., its genetics have
been so shaped by the local environment that the plant acts as though it “knows”
what the length of the growing season is. We further assume that the growing
season lasts for 5 time units and still further that the growth of the vegetative part
ΔX in the time DT is given by
A save-disabled version of STELLA and the computer models of this book are available at
www.iseesystems.com/modelingdynamicbiologicalsystems.
B. Hannon and M. Ruth, Modeling Dynamic Biological Systems,
Modeling Dynamic Systems, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-05615-9_19,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
151
The Optimum Plant
Plant, a Natural Body that has a vegetable Soul.
[1696 Phillips (ed. 5)]
19.1 Optimum Plant Model
Just describing or simulating the change in living organisms may simply not be
good enough. We all want ultimately to predict what these organisms would do
under prescribed circumstances. Scientists interested in predictions first need a
good description of the behavior of the living organism. Toward that end, they
frequently find it advantageous to set up optimality hypotheses of the organism’s
behavior and then compare the optimization results with results of experiments on
the actual dynamics of the organism.
The work begun by Cohen in 1971 on the optimization of plants makes a good
example of this kind of approach [1]. A good summary is provided in Roughgarden
[2]. Cohen’s model is the simplest model possible of optimal control in plants. The
basic hypothesis is that this plant strives to produce the maximum reproductive
biomass by the end of the growing season, a period that is T units long. We assume
that the plant is genetically “wired” for this growing season, i.e., its genetics have
been so shaped by the local environment that the plant acts as though it “knows”
what the length of the growing season is. We further assume that the growing
season lasts for 5 time units and still further that the growth of the vegetative part
ΔX in the time DT is given by
A save-disabled version of STELLA and the computer models of this book are available at
www.iseesystems.com/modelingdynamicbiologicalsystems.
B. Hannon and M. Ruth, Modeling Dynamic Biological Systems,
Modeling Dynamic Systems, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-05615-9_19,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
151