One of the first publicly available systems was GENESIS (Grefenstette, 1984) which has since been used as the building block for many other GA systems, such as GENEsYs (Baeck, 1992). The majority of existing GA tools are written in C/C++. Many are available free for non-commercial activity. The modeller typically implements the model directly into the code of the computer program. Generally, the only requirement of a fitness function is to return a value indicating the quality of the individual solution under evaluation. This gives the modeller almost unlimited freedom in building the model, therefore a diverse range of modelling structures can be incorporated into the GA. Although, C/C++ is a robust programming language for algorithmic software development, this adds to the expertise required by the modeller. Typically, a user-friendly interface is not available as this is not intrinsic to the GA search process. This is definitely a disadvantage over the usability and history of development of traditional optimisation modelling approaches, especially in mathematical programming.
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