Below is the explaination regarding this code from Jordan. Attached is the code in its last form.

Hi Lucas,

I'll try to fit a bunch of stuff into this email, so hopefully some of it is useful/interesting.

As far as the evolutionary algorithm goes, I'll send you the code and let you look at it yourself. the paper that I am developing it from comes from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282857432_INTEGRATION_OF_REMCOM_XFDTD_AND_OCTAVE_FOR_THE_AUTOMATED_OPTIMAL_DESIGN_OF_MICROWAVE_ANTENNAS. My code has a couple differences in that I didn't look at the past k iterations like the paper does, but instead I have 5 parallel designs being run and look at how many of those improve the output. This is subtly different and might not be good, because it considers each design at the same time, so the mean doesn't have time to adjust before it is reevaluated if that makes sense. Anyways, just something to think about.

The basic structure for the code is that it is run with command line arguments, so that you compile it with whatever name ( I usually call it evolved_dipole, but doesn't matter). So it is run as 

$./evolved_dipole --start

for the first time in a run and then every subsequent time in a run

$./evolve_dipole --cont

The --start will create the initial population, and record the parameters in a .csv file called handshake.csv. The --cont will read in a file called handshook.csv that theoretically will have the output of the antenna simulations for each antenna.

The first obvious thing I can think of that is missing in this script is that it doesn't write a number to a txt file in the watch folder, but I'll explain that later. The second obvious thing that I didn't add to this is the checking of the exit condition d/do < some value (see paper if this is confusing). The third thing I can think of is that I don't have any constraints on the values that the script produces. It will probably be valuable to include some constraints on these values at the very least so that you don't get negative distances. In addition, this script should be easily generalizable by increasing NVAR and changing the mean and deviation vectors. The code is also not particularly pretty so I apologize for that. I tried to comment a decent amount.

Then, there is the XF script. So the XF script should input the antenna parameters, create the simulations and then start them. Then output the data. One of the things that I never ended up doing here is that the data output can only be done after the simulations have finished running, so you'll need to figure out how to get that to work if you use XF, so I'll include the scripts separately. For the output.xmacro script you will need to specify the simulation and run id each time it is used. I think it might be possible to just have a while function that will wait x seconds and then reevaluate and the condition is whether the data is available, but that might not be the best way.

Then, we get to the controlling portion of the code. I have a batch script which should control a bash script (batch submission for clusters is weird). so the bash script theoretically should load the xf module, run evolved_dipole --start, watch a folder and see if a certain number is written to a file, run the xf simulation, watch again for a different number, run the evolved_dipole --cont (or arasim first eventually) and then it creates a loop and should run theoretically until the exit condition is reached in which case --cont will need to write a different value than before and everything should end (i don't know that I've included this part yet).

The big problem here is that calling the XF script from the command line is more difficult than it originally appeared to be. According to Remcom (the company that creates XF), you should be able to run an XF script from the command line with the option --execute-macro-script=/path/to/macro. However, this isn't supported (we think) by the version of XF that we have on OSC, and so they are looking in (talk to Carl abou this) to updating XF and how much that would cost. I'm not entirely sure that this is a solution either, because this requires calling the GUI for XF and I'm not sure that this is able to be done in a batch submission (clusters don't like using cluster computing with GUIs). Thus, it might be worthwhile to look into using NEC or HFSS, which I don't know anything about.

Have fun and let me know if you need any clarification or help,

Jordan

#!/bin/bash

module load xfdtd #load the XF module for use

cd Evolved_Dipole #move to Evolved_Dipole Directory

./Evolved_Dipole --start #Create First Gen

while inotifywait ~/Evolved_Dipole/watches -r -e modify -m; do #wait until watches directory is modified
    if tail -n1 ~/Evolved_Dipole/watches/watch.txt | grep 0; then #if a 0 is written to watch.txt then run xf macro
	xfui --execute-macro-script=/users/PAS0654/osu8742/XFScripts/dipole_PEC.xmacro
    elif tail -n1 ~/Evolved_Dipole/watches/watch.txt | grep 1; then #if a 1 has been written to watch.txt then make Gen 2 or higher
	./Evolved_Dipole --cont
    else #if anything else is written then end
    fi
done