Electronic Version Approved:

The spray treatment planning project is designed to assist the pesticide management programs as a computerized decision support system for optimizing spray routes. This optimization problem is simplified as the capacitated vehicle routing problem. Because the exhaustive search costs a great deal of time to solve the combinatorial optimization problems, Ant Metaheuristic is used to find the solution in a more efficient way. The algorithm of Ant Metaheuristic is originally developed based on the phenomenon of ants ’ foraging behavior which is a kind of indirect communication by leaving pheromones. The results from Ant Metaheuristic are compared with the results from the exhaustive search and the Genetic Algorithm. The software CASPER is found to be a useful tool for calculating the results for different routes. Although the Ant Metaheuristic result is not optimal like the exhaustive search, the result is considered to be good enough, taking into account the program runtime and efficiency