Description
Introduction: An event-driven simulation is a computer program that mimics the behavior
of people or objects in a system in response to events that occur at certain times. The program
must maintain a data object for each person or object (called an actor) and place it in a queue
according to the time of its event. It then reads the queue in the order of the events and, for
each event, causes the corresponding actor to do its actions scheduled for that time. The action
of the actor may be to change its own state, change the state of the system, do something on
behalf of another actor, or something else. Sometimes, the action will cause the actor to rejoin
the event queue for a subsequent action. Sometimes, the action may add some other actor to
the event queue or to another queue.
Assignment Description:
In this assignment, you will simulate customers arriving at a bank and standing in line in front of one
of the tellers. People arrive at random intervals. Each person waits in his/her selected line until reaching
the head of that line. When a person reaches the head of his line, the teller provides service for a random
amount of time. After the service is completed, the person leaves the bank. The purpose of the
simulation is to measure the average amount of time people spend between arriving at the bank and
leaving the bank.
Assume that when there is a separate line for each teller, a newly arrived person joins the
shortest line (or selects randomly among the set of equally short lines) and stays in that line
until served. That is, no person leaves a line without being served, and no person hops from
one line to another.
If a teller has finished serving a customer and there are no other customers waiting in its line,
the teller selects the first customer from the line of another, randomly-chosen teller and serves
that customer. If there are no customers waiting at all, the teller does other duties for a (small)
random amount of time before checking the lines again.
The entire purpose of this simulation is to compare the performance of a single line serving all
tellers versus separate lines for each teller.
Pre-requisites: knowledge of Structures and function pointer
Implementing your program
Your program should be called qSim. It needs to do several things:–
Get and interpret the program parameters from the command line.
Create a structure variable for each customer indicating his/her arrival time at the bank. Arrival
times are determined from a uniform random number generator and the input parameters of the
simulation. Also create a structure variable for each teller, with a random idle time in the range
1-600 seconds. All constants in this simulation must be defined symbolically.
Create a single event queue in the form of a linked list. The members of the linked list may be
customer events or teller events.
Place each object in the event queue sorted according to the time of its event. That is, the event
with the earliest time is at the head of the queue, and the event with the latest time is at the tail
of the queue. Note: Your program instantiates all the customer-arrival objects at the beginning
of the program; as it creates each one, the object is given a random arrival time (sometime
during the day) and then put into the queue.
Play out the simulation as follows: take the first event off the event queue, advance a simulated
clock to the time of that event, and invoke the action method associated with that event.
Continue until the event queue is empty.
Print out the statistics gathered by the simulation.
For this assignment, you will need to play the simulation twice — once for a bank with a single
queue and multiple tellers and once for a bank with a separate queue for each teller. Draw some
comparison about the average time required for a person to be served at the bank under each
queue regime.
Here are some of the actions that can occur when an event reaches the head of the event queue:
If the event represents a newly arrived customer at the bank, add that person onto the
end of a teller line — either the common line (in the case of a bank with a single line
for all tellers) or to the shortest teller line. If there are several equally short teller lines,
choose one at random.
If the event represents a customer whose service at the bank has been completed, collect
statistics about the customer: in particular, how long has the customer been in the bank,
from arrival time to completion of teller service. After collecting the statistics, the
customer leaves the bank and its Event object is deleted.
If the event represents a teller who has either completed serving a customer or has
completed an idle time task, gather statistics about that teller. If there is no customer
waiting in any line, put a teller event back into the event queue with a random idle time
of 1-150 seconds.
If there is a customer waiting in line, remove the first customer from its line, generate a random
service time according to the input parameters of the program, and add two events to the event
queue, sorted by time. One is a customer event and represents the completion of that service.
The other event is a teller event representing completion of a service and to look for the next
customer (or to idle).
Implementation Details:
You must define one or more structures that allow you to represent Events, Customers, and
Tellers. It is suggested that the most important structure of your simulation should be Event.
How you distinguish between events associated with customers and events associated with
tellers is your choice.
Two methods of an Event are to add it to the event queue and to remove it from the event
queue. In addition, each Event has an action method that is to be invoked when an Event is
removed from the event queue. The action method should somehow distinguish between
customers and tellers and invoke the appropriate action function for that kind of event. These
should perform the appropriate action for a customer or teller.
Each line in front of a teller should be implemented as a variable of a structure tellerQueue.
Implement this structures using a linked list. You will need to write methods to add customers
to the end of the linked list and to remove them from the head of the list. In addition, include a
static variable in the tellerQueue class that indicates which line (i.e., instance of the
tellerQueue class) is the shortest. If more than one line is equally short, select one at random.
The eventQueue itself should also be implemented by a linked list. You will need to write a
method to add an Event to the eventQueue in time order. This method should iterate through
the list until it finds an Event with a time greater than the Event being inserted, and then it
should insert the new Event just before that Event. (Note: This implies that if two events
happen to have the same time, the one added to the queue second goes after the event added
first. Also, remember that it is possible that the event being added will become the new head
of the queue.) You will also need a method to remove an Event from the event queue and
invoke the action method of the event.
Every time a Function Pointer is called, it must be logged to show that you using function
Pointer.
Input
The command line of your program should be of the following form:
./qSim #customers #tellers simulationTime averageServiceTime
The numbers of customers and tellers should be integers, and the simulation and average
service times should be floating point numbers in units of minutes. E.g
./qSim 100 4 60 2.3
should be interpreted to mean that 100 customers and four tellers should be simulated over a
period of 60 simulated minutes. The service time for each teller is an average of 2.3 minutes.
Random Number Generation
To generate random numbers, use the function rand().
To generate random arrival times with a uniform distribution, the following is suggested:–
float arrTime = simulationTime * rand()/float(RAND_MAX);
It is useful to generate all customer arrivals at the beginning of the program and put them into
the event queue in order of arrival time.
To generate random service times, the following is suggested:–
float serviceTime = 2*averageServiceTime*rand()/float(RAND_MAX);
Output
After your simulation has completed for both types of queuing regimes, you should print out a
summary with the following information:–
Total number of customers served and total time required to serve all customers
Number of tellers and type of queuing (one per teller or common)
Average (i.e., mean) amount of time a customer spent in the bank and the standard deviation
Maximum wait time from the time a customer arrives to the time he/she is seen by a teller.
Total amount of teller service time and total amount of teller idle time.
The information that you need to print should determine the statistics that you gather during
the simulations.
GNUPlot: plot a graph between average amounts of time a customer spent in bank versus
number of tellers (assume number of queue = 1)
Deliverables
You must submit the following:
Folder Structure: src, include, bin, output etc
The files of your project, including .h files and .c files to implement your simulation, and the
makefile. The target of the makefile should be called qSim.
At least three different test cases that show the behavior of the bank under both queuing
regimes. Show the command line and the output.
A document called README.pdf summarizing your program, how to run it, and detailing any
problems that you had.
An analysis of your results — i.e., under what circumstances a single queue is better or worse
than a queue per teller. You may include this analysis in your README
Before submitting your assignment, clean your project to get rid of extraneous files.
