Concurrent Programming - CT074-3-2 Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation Level 2

Objective:

This assignment has been designed for students to apply appropriate concurrent program
methods in implementing a concurrent program from a program specification.

Learning Outcomes

ON COMPLETION OF THIS ASSIGNMENT, YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO DEMONSTRATE THE

FOLLOWING LEARNING OUTCOME(S):
No. Learning Outcome Assessment
1 Explain the fundamental concepts of concurrency and parallelism Exam
in the design of a concurrent system (C2, PLO1)
2 Apply the concepts of concurrency and parallelism in the Individual
construction of a system using a suitable programming language. Assignment (System)
(C3, PLO2)
3 Explain the safety aspects of multi-threaded and parallel systems Individual
(A3, PLO6) Assignment (Report)

Programme Outcomes (PO):

PLO2 Cognitive Skills - This relates to thinking or intellectual capabilities and the ability to apply
knowledge and skills. The capacity to develop levels of intellectual skills progressively begins
from understanding, critical/creative thinking, assessment, and applying, analysing, problem
solving as well as synthesizing to create new ideas, solutions, strategies, or new practices. Such
intellectual skills enable the learner to search and comprehend new information from different
fields of knowledge and practices.

Individual Assignment - System (25%):

Question Vs Taxonomy
Question Cognitive Level
No. Topic 1 2 3 4 5 6 PLO
SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ
Appropriateness of coding techniques 2
used to implement design with
1 20%
appropriate comment lines in source
codes
Appropriateness of the Java 2
2 concurrent programming facilities 20%
used.
Program runs appropriately with 2
3 20%
basic requirements
4 Additional requirements met 20% 2
Explanations of concurrency concepts 2
5 implemented with relevant code 20%
samples
Total 100%

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Concurrent Programming - CT074-3-2 Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation Level 2

Submission Requirements: Part 2

Assignment Handout Date : 25th November 2021

Assignment Due Date : 25th February 2022

Case Study

The Problem

This part of the assignment will require you to implement the terminal simulation, as broken
down in the sections below.

The management of an airport thinks that the way in which the airport is operated means that
incoming flights must spend too much time waiting for landing clearance. To evaluate the
situation a simulation of the airport has been commissioned. This simulation will simply run
with text output describing the events as they occur in the airport and collect a minimal
amount of statistical data.

Intention of assignment

Even if valuable to the owner, the simulation is not the main purpose of this assignment -
indeed, if this was the case there are much better techniques for simulating than writing a
concurrent program.

The requirement of this assignment is to implement a program in which synchronization and

communication takes place between several concurrent processes. It is intended to force you
to solve (and not simply avoid) a range of interesting synchronisation problems.

Asia Pacific Airport

You have been tasked to automate the task of Air Traffic Controller (ATC). ATCs have three
main tasks as an aircraft approaches an airport, all of which must be carried out as quickly as
possible:

*******************************Basic Requirements******************************

• Ensure that the aircraft does not collide with another aircraft or any other obstacle.

• Ensure that the approaching aircraft is inserted smoothly into the traffic around the airport,
with a minimum of disruption to the flight paths of other aircraft.

• Guide the aircraft onto a runway, again with a minimum of disruption to the rest of the
traffic around the airport.
Once an aircraft obtains permission to land, it should land on the runway, coast to the
assigned gate, dock to the gate, allow passengers to disembark, refill supplies and fuel, receive
new passengers, undock, coast to the assigned runway and take-off.
A congested scenario should be simulated where planes are waiting to land while the 2 gates
are occupied.
As the airport is small, there is no waiting area on the ground for the planes to wait for a gate
to become available.

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Concurrent Programming - CT074-3-2 Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation Level 2

Figure 1: Layout of the Asia Pacific Airport (Not to scale)

*****************************Additional Requirements****************************

Special cases, such as aircraft experiencing fuel shortages, must be dealt with.

These events should happen concurrently:

- Passengers disembarking/embarking

- Refill supplies and cleaning of aircraft

- Refuelling of aircraft

State your assumptions and how you will implement them.

The Statistics

At the end of the simulation, i.e., when all other processes have terminated cleanly, the ATC
manager should do some sanity checks of the airport and print out some statistics on the run.
The result of the sanity checks must be printed. You must

• Check that all bays are indeed empty.

• Print out statistics on

- Maximum/Average/Minimum waiting time for a plane.

- Number of planes served/Passengers boarded.

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Concurrent Programming - CT074-3-2 Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation Level 2

Deliverables:

For this exercise, you are to model the ATC scenario and design a Java program to simulate
activity for the airport:

• Altogether, 10 planes should try to land at the airport.

• Use a random number generator, so a new airplane arrives every 0, 1, 2, or 3 seconds.

(This might be accomplished by an appropriate statement sleep (rand.nextInt(3000));

• Assume each plane can accommodate 50 passengers.

• Assume passengers are always ready to embark and disembark the terminal (i.e., no
capacity issues inside the passenger terminals)

Sample Output

In order to see what is happening dynamically you must have output from the passengers, the
air traffic controller, and the pilots reporting all their major events.

Add information about which process/thread is doing the output. This way you can see if a
process/thread acts for another, which is strictly forbidden, but is a common error for Java
solutions (objects are not processes!). An example of such incorrect behaviour is
Thread-ATC : 21.31: Plane 5: Requesting permission to land!
main : 21.50: ATC: Please wait and join the circle queue.
Thread-Passenger-8 : 21.50: I’m boarding Plane 2 now.
Where you can see that not only the ATC thread but also the main thread is acting for the ATC.

You must not

• Kill a thread or process. You may not use any of the following primitives in Java:
o Thread.stop
o Thread.resume
o Thread.suspend
o Thread.interrupt

You may not use the destroy or stop(0) primitives in - except to take care of temporary
resources like simple timers.

• Solve the last orders problem in a manner forbidden in the description above.

• Resolve communication with an all-purpose one-channel solution.

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Concurrent Programming - CT074-3-2 Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation Level 2

Implementation

You should implement your simulation in Java.

Each simulation run should not take more than 60 seconds to simulate.

Documentation for System (Week 12)

The documentation should detail the system implementation and testing.

1. Basic requirements met:

• List of requirements met.
- Code snippet of the Java concurrent programming facilities implemented.
- Explanations of concurrency concepts (atomic statements, synchronization, etc)
implemented if not stated in Part 1.

2. Additional requirements met:

• List of requirements met.
- Code snippet of the Java concurrent programming facilities implemented.
- Explanations of concurrency concepts (atomic statements, synchronization, etc)
implemented if not stated in Part 1.

3. Requirements which were NOT met:

• List of basic requirements.
• List of additional requirements

No more than 1000 words excluding references/appendix/coding.

Submission for System (Week 12)

• Documentation for system

o The documentation file should be named TP0XXXXX CCP Document.docx
• Java files required to run the simulation.
o Zipped into a single zip file named TP0XXXXX CCP.zip
• Video of the simulation running. Maximum 5 minutes per person.
o Simulate scenarios as stated above.
o The video file should be named TP0XXXXX CCP Video.zip

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Concurrent Programming - CT074-3-2 Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation Level 2

Marking Scheme (NOT for student’s documentation guidance)

Criteria Total marks Marks

awarded
Appropriateness of coding techniques used to implement 20
design with appropriate comment lines in source codes *
Appropriateness of the Java concurrent programming facilities 20
used.
Program runs appropriately with basic requirements * 20
Additional requirements met * 20
Explanations of concurrency concepts implemented with 20
relevant code samples *
TOTAL MARKS 100

*Based on video presentation of the simulation.

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