ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book adopts a historical and comparative approach to the different research programmes operating in the same field: modelling the growth and morphogenesis of single vegetative plants in botany, forestry and agronomy. It describes the technical and formal reasons and the epistemological decisions that explain why the computer simulation of the various aspects of plants gradually replaced the mathematical models. The book presents a distinctive general classification of the epistemic functions of scientific models, as well as a classification of the different types of computer simulation. This approach is intended to remain very general in scope, in the hope that it will thus benefit research on models and simulations in completely different fields from those of plants or biology. The book deals with a systematic application of these classifications to the different types of models and simulations encountered in the case of plants.
