CS 2390 W96 Programming Assignment 3

Planning the Buses around the Olympics Village

DUE MARCH 5 IN CLASS

Extra Credit Available on This Problem

Discussion on this assignment.

ACOG has decided to provide buses to move visitors to the '96 Summer Olympics around the Olympics Village from the MARTA station. You have been hired to design a simulation to help them decide how to route the buses. The goal is to find a way to route the buses to minimize the average travel time between arrival at the MARTA station and arrival at the Venue of the visitor's choice.

• Visitors arrive via subway trains at the MARTA station on average every seven minutes (normal distribution, deviation of two minutes). Between 20 and 50 people arrive on each train (uniform distribution). It takes four to six minutes (uniform distribution) to load a bus. Only one bus can load at a time. (A bus can't load more people than are waiting at the MARTA station.)
• 50% of the visitors want to get to the walkway to the stadium, 30% want to go to the swimming venue, and 20% want to go to the boxing venue.
• Travel times between the positions are as follows:

  From	To	Travel Time
  MARTA	Stadium Walkway	5 minutes
  MARTA	Boxing Venue	5 minutes
  Boxing Venue	Swimming Venue	20 minutes
  Swimming Venue	Stadium Walkway	10 minutes

• It takes two minutes to unload the bus. (We're not worrying right now about getting people from the Venues back to MARTA.)
• You have five buses which can each hold sixty people maximum.

You are welcome to route the buses anyway that you want. Some strategies to consider:

• All buses run a fixed route, perhaps Stadium Walkway to Swimming to Boxing and back to MARTA.
• Buses run a fixed route, but if no one wants to go on (e.g., bus empties), you turn it around.
• Some buses take the route one way (Stadium to Swimming to Boxing) while others reverse the route (Boxing to Swimming to Stadium).
• Some or all buses go to one and only one venue. It is reasonable to load up a bus that only goes to one venue with only the people that are going to that venue, i.e., if a bus is labelled with one venue, then people will figure out to only get on that bus if they are going to that venue. However, anything more complicated (e.g., fixed route, reverse route, goes to only two venues, etc.) is too complicated for the visitors to be smart about which bus to get on -- you have to take the visitors regardless of where they're going. For example, if you have one bus that goes only to Boxing, it's okay for you to load only those going to Boxing on that bus. But if you have another bus that goes to Swimming and the Stadium Walkway, you must load that bus with people going to Boxing as well.

Here are the pieces that you need to turn in:

• Analysis: Are you going to have different classes of buses running different kinds of routes? Or just five instances of buses? Do our simulation objects or resources need to communicate?
• Design: How do you implement this analysis? Are visitors simulation objects or resources? How about buses?
• Results: You must run at least two different kinds of strategies. You must hand in a description of the strategies, and a histogram (listing average and max/min) of the visitor travel/waiting time for each run. Run your simulations for two hours (120 minutes).
• Source code: You must hand in the source code from each of the two runs.

BONUS: The lowest average waiting time in each section receives an additional TEN points on this assignment. (Yes, 110 points on the assignment will be possible.)