Waptia

Description

Waptia is general genetic optimization algorithm - it tries to maximize user supplied function of N variables (so called "Fitness Function"). Function is given as strictly typed VI reference. So the optimization goal may be described as: find such set of N numbers for which Fitness Function value is highest.

Waptia is LabVIEW implementation of quite well known genetic optimization algorithm Pikaia by Paul Charbonneau & Barry Knapp developed in Fortran-77. For more information on Pikaia and some background informatio on genetic algorithms visit: http://www.hao.ucar....kaia/pikaia.php

Usage is very simple - just put Waptia.vi on block diagram and provide number of independent variables and fitness function VI reference (which may be created using included template). There is of course a lot of parameters to tune, but default set usually does good job.

Installation

Preferably install VIP package with VI Package Manager
Alternatively extract ZIP to User.lib.
There are no external dependencies.

Documentation

Documentation is provided in "Waptia docs.rtf" file. It's just a description of all controls of Waptia.vi with some background information. Same information may be found in context help. Information on how to write your own fitness function is provided as comments in "Fitness Function Template.vit"
If you want to understand how Waptia works, whole code is extensively commented.

Examples

There is one quite complex example (but I hope that still understandable) located in _examples folder - "multimodal optimise.vi"

License

This work is published under BSD license (text of the license in license.txt file)