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The horticultural sector in France is presently facing enormous challenges, e.g. a generally more variable climate with more frequent extremes, or an increasingly restrictive legislation pushing for sustainable development, to name but two. Sustainable production in horticulture implies an important reduction in pesticides, preserving at the same time high levels of produce quality, and all this in the context of global competition, and of a critical and choosy consumer. The pressure is thus on all members of the sector (producers, breeders, researchers...) to rapidly come up with solutions for these challenges. This implies in the first place that the currently used production systems must be subjected to a thorough analysis of their strengths and weaknesses with respect to sustainability, employing all suitable means. One strategy applicable in a research context to analyse such systems and to predict future outcomes is crop modelling. Going a step further, a spatially explicit functional-structural model or virtual plant helps to integrate information about the production system and could thus be used to design and test new production systems before trying them in reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]