Learning about a new field is often accompanied by a lot of new acronyms that seems to be perfectly clear for anybody else. Plant modelling in GroIMP is no exception from this. Therefore we want to provide you with a small overview of the most commonly used once.

functional structual plant modelling.

FSPM is the main field of application for GroIMP and describes the aim of simulating the spacial/geometrical appearances and the functions of a plant simultaneously.

Lindenmayer system

Lindenmayer systems¹⁾ are a group rewriting grammars first described by Aristid Lindenmayer. There main usage is the simulation of growth behavior and they are often used in FSPMs.

Simplified: The plant is described a string of turtle ²⁾ commands and its growth is described by rules that define how in each step different parts of this string are replaced by new parts.

Relational Growth Grammars

RGG uses parallel graph rewriting to extend the concepts of L-systems to mathematical graphs. This allows the plant to be a more complex structure including cross references and scales. RGG is described in the theses of Ole Kniemeyer ( publications-2008)

In GroIMP RGG is also used quite commonly to describe the integration of XL in the GroIMP platform see: RGG (Plugin)

extended L-systems

XL is programming language combines of Java and RGG to allow the creation of both, java³⁾ functions and RGG-rules.

(The specification of this language can be found here: https://manual.grogra.de/de.grogra.xl/index.html or While XL is the original programming language and can be used in GroIMP with .xl files, it is commonly used with in the RGG(Plugin) of GroIMP.

Growth Grammar-related Interactive Modelling Platform

GroIMP is a graph based 3D modelling platform that supports several plugins (see: https://plugins.grogra.de) and can be used to create different kinds of models. While it is commonly used trough the RGG plugin it is also possible to create e.g. GreenLab projects or only UI based 3D models.

The RGG plugin, describes a simplified integration of the XL programming language into the platform GroIMP by doing several parts implicitly.

This allows the user e.g to create XL code without creating a surrounding class or to use default libraries without importing them. Moreover the RGG plugin handles large parts of the graph management by it self. You can find some introduction in the tutorial: RGG Code structure introduction