Résumé
OpenAlea is a collaborative project dedicated to the analysis, simulation and modelisation of plants. OpenAlea provides a component framework that is developed in Python, a visual programming environment, and a set of components that are written in different languages. OpenAlea is released under an open source license and can be downloaded from http://openalea.gforge.inria.fr. Thanks to the active participation of several laboratories involved in biology and computer science, OpenAlea provides enough scientific components to simulate the interaction between plant growth and environmental factors such as light, water, nutrient, and pest. First, we will present OpenAlea, its architecture and visual programming environment. In the second part, several scenarii of plant modelling will be presented. These scenarii will illustrate how scientific components that are developed independently by several groups in different disciplines can be glued together to answer scientific questions. We will focus our discussion on a selection of scientific components such as: * ecophysiological processes (light, water interception, pests, ...) * geometrical modelling and analysis (e.g., 3D reconstruction, fractal) * graph data structures and algorithms * formal languages for plant simulation (LSystem, Graph rewriting) Finally, we will present our methodology to manage the deployment of heterogeneous softwares and to animate the OpenAlea community (i.e., to enhance the re-usability of software and sharing development between various teams).