621 PB 331 A FRUIT TREE COOLING CONTROL SYSTEM SIMULATOR
A simulator of a control system for evaporative cooling of crop canopies was developed. This development, prior to implementation of an irrigation/cooling system, allowed for experimentation before committing resources to the field system. The project provided insight into problems of modeling interaction between biological, mechanical, and digital systems and demonstrated how specialists from diverse areas can solve these problems. The object orientation methodology and the C++ programming language were tools for development of this simulator. A communication mechanism was devised to facilitate interactions between software entities representing both concrete and abstract objects corresponding to the problem domain. The object-oriented approach to the system development allowed for better communication between team members, irrespective of their background in software engineering. The modular and polymorphic nature of the object-oriented code made it possible to plan for code reuse in future projects. Simulator development using the object-oriented paradigm was found to be preferable over the procedural model used by team members in other projects in the past.