Outstanding features

This section presents the outstanding features offered by the VSoil platform:

Iterations between modules

When two variables A and B calculated by two different modules MA and MB are coupled (it means that variable A is calculated using variable B and variable B is calculated using variable A), one has the choice between linearization (module MA is executed first and variable A is then used to calculate variable B in module MB) and iterations between modules. The VSoil platform can perform iterations between these two modules. This functionnality is documented in the user manual for iterations between modules.

Connection to Climatik database

Climate data are required for most models hosted or developed in the VSoil platform.The VSoil's modeller can use modules dedicated to the reading of climate data. The official climate_from_files module is an example of such a module. The modeller also has the possibility to retrieve climate data directly from the VSoil platform. VSoil was indeed connected to the Climatik web service. This web service, of tye REST (REpresentational State Transfer), is a software infrastructure set up by the Agroclim unit at INRAE Avignon that provides access to the climatic data in INRAE's national database. If a VSoil model contains a module implementing the climate process with all its output variables contained in the list of climate variables available through the Climatik web service, then the connection to Climatik is automatically proposed by the VSoil platform. Modeller can then connect to Climatik and choose a weather station. The variables to be retrieved are the module's outputs over a time period equal to the duration of the simulation. The official module climate_provider is is supplied with the VSoil platform that reads dynamically during the simulation the climate data returned by the web service. Moreover, a "cache" system was developed by the VSoil team to avoid a modeller from retrieving climate data already obtained from a previous connection to Climatik.

Remote calculations

Tools for model exploration: sensitivity analysis and parameters estimation