Once you have written the objective function of the problem to be solved, and you have created the configuration file(s) with the desired options, the last step is to call the optimization algorithm. To do so, first you move to the root directory of the toolbox, then you start MATLAB and finally you invoke the mhtb_main function. This function receives two arguments. The first one is a string containing an identifier of the library you want to use (‘ssGA’, ‘jEA’ or ‘mallba’). The second one can be a string with the name of the file containing the configuration parameters or a cell array with these parameters.

Let’s illustrate it with an example. A user has installed the toolbox in the directory MHTB of his home directory. He wants to solve a problem with the jEA library, so he implements the objective function, sets the options in the problem_opts.txt file and places it in MHTB/opts. Finally, he keys in the following:

$ cd ~/MHTB
$ matlab
>> mhtb_main(‘jEA’, ‘opts/problem_opts.txt’);

Due to the use of MPI, you must start MATLAB with the -nodesktop option to carry out parallel executions of the MALLBA library.