In this lab you write a program that simulates a ride at a theme park. In this ride, people get into a small boat, navigate the boat through a course of obstacles and then dock and leave the boat. Management would like to assess how long people spend waiting for the ride and as well as how much utilization they are getting out of each boat. Note that each person takes a variable amount to time to navigate the course, so the order they depart is not necessarily the order in which they leave. Also, there is only one spot on the dock where a person can get into a boat, so while the person is climbing in, boats must wait in line. This means you will have to have two queues: one for people waiting to board a boat and one for boats waiting to be boarded. For simplicity, you can assume that unloading from the boat happens quickly and doesn't need to be accounted for.
The interface should be whatever you like: The easiest is the console input. The inputs to the simulation will include the average inter-arrival time of riders, the average loading time for a rider, the average ride time for a rider, the total length of the simulation and the number of boats . The inter-arrival time of riders is the length of time that elapses after one riders arrives until the next one arrives. This will vary from rider to rider, but you can input the average value so that you can examine the system under different levels of demand. Similarly, the loading and ride time of each person will vary, but you can specify the average of these values.
Time is measured in an arbitrary unit which we will call `clock ticks'. It's not terribly important what a clock tick actually represents because all the values are relative. Any interval of time (including the average values input by the user) should be specified as integers, so time is rounded to the nearest clock tick. I recommend that you keep the average inter-arrival time of riders to be at least 100 so as to minimize the effects of rounding. If the inter-arrival time is 100, then you should simulate the system for about a million clock ticks so that the values that you are measuring will converge to an average value. (The longer you run the simulation, the more stable these values will be).
The running time of your algorithm should not depend on the number of clock ticks that you run your simulation. This is because you should write your code as an event-driven simulation. That is, you will determine the next event (whether it be the arrival of a person to the rider, the departure of a boat with a rider from the dock, the return of a boat and rider to the dock) and advance the clock automatically to the time of the next event. That is, your program should take roughly the same amount of time if the average inter-arrival time, loading time and riding time is 10 and the simulation length is 1000 as it would if all of these values were multiplied by 10. In order to do that you should store all your future events on a Priority Queue, where the events are ordered by the time they are scheduled to occur. To determine the next event, you just have to take the element with the smallest time value. The code for the Priority Queue class is supplied below.
The PriorityQueue is written as a generic data structure so that it can store
any set of items which implements the interface Comparable which
I have also provided for you. Note that your class which implements Comparable
will have to implement a method compareTo because it is declared
as an abstract method in Comparable. The deleteMin()
method returns the item with the smallest values according to the compareTo
method.
You are also provided with other classes to use, e.g. the EventGenerator, which generates the arrival of riders. Your program should have an instance of this class to generate the input data. Before you run your simulation, you should use the following method to inform the event generator of the parameters input by the user:
public void setParameters( int avgInterArrivalTime, int avgLoadingTime, int
avgRideTime )
public Rider getNextEvent( int lastArrival )
The EventGenerator uses a random number generator to produce the inter-arrival time, loading time and riding time for the particular customer. On average, the values generated will match the average values input by the user, but there are some random fluctuations in the values. In this case, it is implemented as a Poisson Process . You will probably learn about these some time in your career here in ICS. For example, this is the standard probabilistic process which we use to simulate networking events like packet arrivals. In fact, the code you are writing in this lab, for boat-and-riders simulation, is based on the same principes as real-life simulators of networks, chips, distributed computing applications, biological systems, etc, etc.
You should also use the priority queue data structure to store the boat/rider
pairs are currently out on the course. You want to store these in a priority
queue since you will need to determine which one returns next. The constructor
for PriorityQueue takes in a value which is the maximum number of items that
will ever be stored in the priority queue. Each time you run a simulation, you
should create an instance of class PriorityQueue in which this value is set to
be the number of boats. The method add throws an instance of class
QueueFullException
(also provided) if you attempt to add an item when the priority queue is full.
You will need to provide code which will catch that exception when you call the
add method.
You will need to write your own class Queue . This should also be written as a generic data structure. In particular, you will have an instance of Queue which stores instances of Boat and an instance which stores instances of Rider. You can choose how you want to implement your queue. However, your choice must be completely transparent to the user.
The statistics which you should print out after processing all the events are:
What to turn in: