Final Report: Saga 3 Brief History of the Saga Project

This report documents the latest work in the SAGA (Spray Advisor using Genetic Algorithms) project, the goal of which is to provide an effective means for a computer to recommend an optimal set of parameters for spraying a wooded area with pesticide. Current work is in two directions. One of these is the maintenance of older SAGA programs, some of which were built on now-obsolete platforms. The other is the development of a unified framework, SAGA3, to maximize code reuse and provide a consistent and flexible interface across SAGA programs. Brief History of the SAGA Project The most recent work in the SAGA project builds upon what previous researchers have already accomplished. This section briefly describes the history of the SAGA project and its successes to set the stage for discussion of the issues facing SAGA and how we resolve them. SAGA originated as a prototype generational genetic algorithm (henceforth GA) written in Fortran. To compute the fitness of an individual, it created a text file describing the individual and ran a standalone DOS version of AgDisp on it. FortranSAGA proved the feasibility of applying evolutionary computation methods to this domain, but it suffered from a crude interface and long running time. Its successor, VBSAGA, was written in Visual Basic 5. It featured a friendlier graphical user interface and linked to a DLL of AgDisp instead of calling a standalone executable, which resulted in significantly improved running time. A second version of it improved usability and implemented self-adaptation of GA parameters. Yet VB-SAGA still used more or less