Application

The application should be more or less self-explaining. However, a short overview shall be given here. To compute the shortest path you have to complete the following steps:

1. Define a graph and download the XML file (cf. Section 2.2).
2. Download the application from http://bioinsp.zindel.org and unzip the file.
3. Start the application. In order to do so enter the folder and double click geneticpath.bat on Windows or execute ./geneticpath.sh in a terminal when using Mac or Linux.
4. In the left tab (cf. Figure 1) choose a graph. The files in the folder maps are shown in the dropdown menu, others can be chosen using the button or select file. You can indicate a zoom factor and an intendation. Using the parameters Delta x and Delta y you can define how many pixels the graph should be moved right and down, respectively. Once you have chosen all parameters, click on the button Draw Graph to draw the graph.
5. Select the right tab and choose all parameters (confer to Section 2.3.1 for more details).
6. Click on the two nodes between which you would like to compute the shortest path to select them.
7. Click on the button Start Algorithms to start the execution of the algorithms. Please confer to Section 2.3.2 for more details about the possible actions.
8. The progress during the execution is displayed in two ways: in the graphical panel (cf. Section 2.3.3) and in the panel Algorithms (cf. Section 2.3.4).
9. The algorithm automatically stops when the indicated number of generations are completed but you can also stop it earlier (cf. Section 2.3.2).

Figure 1: Graph tab to draw a graph.