Pascal Ballet, Alexandra Fronville, Anne Jeannin-Girardon, Jérémy Rivière, Vincent Rodin and Abdoulaye Sarr.
Simulation of Multicellular Systems.
EURASC 2015, European Academy of Sciences symposium on climate change: impacts on ocean, food production, health and the economy, Poster Session, page 26, Brest (France), 27-28 october 2015.
Abstract:
The theory of complex systems has become more and more relevant over the last thirty years to understand concepts such as emergence and self-organization and their role in biological, physical, chemical and social systems. The use of an Individual-Based approach to model and simulate complex systems has proved to be an efficient way, both in research and teaching, of manipulating these complex systems. We use this Individual-Based approach to propose tools and methods for biologists to create realistic models and simulations of complex biological systems in order to (1) grasp the complexity of these systems, (2) test hypothesis and investigate dynamical systems that otherwise could not be systematically investigated. Among our previous works with biologists, we can mention a large scale tissue morphogenesis simulation based of a flexible biomechanical cell model [1], and a simulation of cellular deformation and migration [1]. We also designed an intuitive software [3] aimed at biologists for teaching and research, that does not require any skills in computer programming. In particular, a specific graphical user interface allows to create in a simple way bottom-up models where unexpected behaviours can emerge from simple interacting entities, and test hypothesis by creating various simulations. This software has been successfully used in middle schools, high schools and universities since 2010.
References
  1. A. Jeannin-Girardon, P. Ballet and V. Rodin.
    Large scale tissue morphogenesis simulation on heterogenous systems based on a flexible biomechanical cell model, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, 12(5):1021-1033, September/October 2015.
  2. A. Sarr, A. Fronville and V. Rodin.
    Morphogenesis Model for Systematic Simulation of Forms' Co-evolution With Constraints : Application to Mitosis.
    TPNC 2014, 3rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Natural Computing, Granada (Spain), 9-11 December 2014. Published in Theoretical Computer Science and General Issues a subseries of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Springer, volume 8890, pages 231-242, December 2014.
  3. http://virtulab.univ-brest.fr

[link] [Ballet15a.pdf]