Peter - why not just pass in the handle to the text control that you wish to update on each iteration of the outer for loop? The signature for your optimizeTrips would then become
function [hit, lT, kmD, ran, perc] = optimizeTrips(i,LP,f,ep,hTxtControl)
and your for loop would be something like
for w=1:21
set(hTxtControl,'String',num2str(w));
pause(0.5);
for ...
end
end
Note how we pause for half a second to allow the control to be updated with the new text (and, depending upon how quick your loops execute, gives the user a chance to see the changing iterations).
You would then call this function as
[x, handles.y, handles.z, ~, b] = optimizeTrips(item,lPinput,handles.c,1, handles.text1);
where handles.text1 is the handle to the text control that you wish to update.
