PSPManalysis
A package for numerical analysis of Physiologically Structured Population Models
2021-10-28
Preface
This software package is distributed to simplify the analysis of physiologically structured population models (PSPMs) or life history models in general. If you are not familiar with PSPMs there are many sources you can check, in particular the original book by Metz and Diekmann (1986), but a more gentle introduction is provided in De Roos (1997). An earlier version of this software has been used to produce the many bifurcation graphs of equilibria in structured population models that appear in De Roos and Persson (2013). The basic layer of the software has hence been tested quite extensively. The current version is built on top of that basic layer to make the implementation of a particular PSPM easier and to make the software package accessible from R. The software can also be used from the command-line of any Unix-based system (Linux or Mac OS) without the overhead of R. The entire software package PSPManalysis, which also includes a front-end for Matlab as well as Unix-command-line usage, can be found at my personal website and at Bitbucket. This manual documents the R package version of PSPManalysis.
The package is free software and released under the GNU General Public License without any warranty or even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose (the official statement of the GPL). If you are using the software for publications, you are kindly asked to credit this software package by a reference to this documentation and the website that hosts the software package, as these are currently the only sources to be referred to.
In case you encounter any problem with the software package, please first verify the problem is not in your own model-specific file, but indeed is a bug in the general software layer. If you are convinced it is a bug in my programming, send me an email with as accurate a description of the problem as possible. Do not not forget to include your model-specific file and details about the invocation of the scripts that caused the problems. Any comments and feedback, both on the code and on the current manual is appreciated and will be considered carefully. In particular concrete comments, for example, explicit suggestions for textual changes in the manual and/or corrections of the mistakes (they are definitely there!) will be highly valued and acknowledged.
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Development of this software was supported by funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement No. 322814