The representation of space in an object-oriented computational pelagic ecosystem

Abstract The HOOD (Hierarchical Object-Oriented Design) methodology, established for software engineering purposes, may be applied to decompose an ecosystem into a hierarchy of entities. Self-reproducing artificial organisms (software entities “living” in the computer memory) may populate the system, allowing to simulate the development of a planktonic population. The artificial creatures exist and move in asynchronous parallelism. Feeding, which was absent in the previous model, permits a regulation of the population growth. Space is an essential reference to be taken into account, because food and other resources are only found at certain locations. Space in turn is also a resource, which should be managed in the software. In the HOOD design, the space object is included in a larger conceptual object, the Environment object. This higher-level object contains a “control object” managing the concurrent access to the resources, as well as the resources themselves. The introduction of spatialized food resources, consumed by the population of artificial organisms, allows a more realistic simulation of the colonization of space by “blooming” pelagic organisms.