The Breeding Scheme Designer is a tool to explore trade offs between different evaluation strategies in breeding programs using deterministic simulation. The purpose for developing this tool was to help simulate the full cycle of a breeding program to help estimate parameters such as heritability and the expected genetic gain, to help understand how breeder's equation terms interact and to enable comparisons between different strategies and understand trade-offs between multiple resource allocation scenarios and their effect to the expected genetic gain. In addition, comparisons of different scenarios with respect to genetic gain per year and genetic gain per dollar invested are enabled.
The tool helps define scenarios with multiple stages of selection.
Figure 1: a comparison between boxplots of three breeding scenarios with three stages each.
Figure 2: heatmaps help to explore the solution space for combinations of input parameters set for different ranges.
This tool has been tested with a small group of breeders from different teams and it is now available as part of the EiB toolbox. Some documents realated to the user study can be found in /eval directory of the project.
The software can be executed through RStudio.
Make sure that the following library dependencies (r packages) are first installed:
- shiny
- DT
- Rcpp
- RcppArmadillo
- ggplot2
- shinyjs
- data.table
- dplyr
- plotly
- openxlsx
- shinyBS
- shinyalert
An instance of the tool is deployed online in the shinyapps.io server: https://alphagenes.shinyapps.io/cycle_scenarios/
- Repo owner/admin : Thanasis Vogogias
- Other community or team contact: Chris Gaynor