Abstract

The Diseases components are four software libraries implementing models to simulate the time evolution of a generic polycyclic fungal disease epidemic and to quantify the impact of the disease on yield formation.  

The Diseases components are:

• InoculumPressure, to estimate the time of the disease onset and to provide models to derive initial disease severity,
• DiseaseProgress, to simulate the disease progress rate of a polycyclic fungal disease as a function of the agro-meteorological conditions and of the plant-pathogen interactions,
• ImpactsOnPlants, to simulate the impact of a plant epidemic on leaf area evolution and biomass growth, via the coupling to crop models, and
• AgroManagementDisease, to simulate the reduction of the disease progress rate as a function of a chemical application, and the decay of the effectiveness of the active principle as a function of air temperature and rainfall.

The documentation of all the models implemented in the Diseases component is provided in this help file.

Each component is an independent software unit, making available specific functionalities and providing access to its services via a defined interface (Donatelli and Rizzoli, 2008). The software architecture of the components is developed adopting three design patterns:

• the Strategy design pattern, which allows plugging-in of alternative model formulations to generate the same outputs, given that various models can be used for the same purpose.
• the Composite design pattern, to compose simple strategies into higher-level strategies to represent part-whole hierarchies, letting client applications to call individual objects or compositions of objects (Gamma et al., 1995).
• The Context design pattern, which allows defining the logic to select among the simple or composite strategies associated.

The components implement the test of pre-conditions and post-conditions for each of the models provided, allowing an input to screen, TXT or XML file, and to .NET listeners. Custom output drivers can also be developed.

The component can be freely used and distributed by modelers and developers in their own applications, if the application contains either a dedicated menu item or a dedicated button calling the Info() method of the component, and links to the original help file. This method displays information about the component and a button which activates the help of the component (examples of how to do this are shown in the sample applications provided to illustrate the use of the component).

The Form Abouts called by the Info() method are reported in this help file for each Diseases component.

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