Thread: Elevator simulation in event time, not clock.

http://www.javaprogrammingforums.com...ulation-3.html

I have a very similar situation to what Norm discussed with this student last year.

I am making a elevator simulator for my class. It needs to be "event time". I am having trouble understanding how I can make an "event time" simulator. Initially I was using a while loop to run a clock time simulation of x seconds for each event, until I ran into a concrete wall and had to call another method which took X seconds, while still needing to execute code.

An example of what I did is:

Spawn person -> person.goToElevator (Takes x seconds) - > person.waitForElevator (Until elevator arrives, x seconds). While this is happening, I needed to create another person and do the same thing, this will add another to the queue if the first person is still waiting. Etc etc, you get the point.

We have not learnt about multi threading, that is the next assignment.

Here is a quote from my lecturer:
"That's right, it requires multi-threading which we're not doing in this paper. Here's a solution that can work:

The person waiting for the lift and then doing lots of other things should do all that in a fraction of a second. So, you don't let the person really wait. Instead, you will set a timestamp in the future in the person object that "he's busy till that time". In all other steps in your simulation you will first check if a person is "busy" (i.e. has a timestamp in the future). If so, you can't use this object, otherwise, you can.

Can you use that?"

I half understand this.. Is anyone in anyway able to provide me with a tiny snippet of code to show me an example of how to go about creating this? I can't wrap my head around it simulating all this in a fraction of a second... How does it create a bigger queue? Etc etc..

Outputs I would have in my final simulation would be, averageQueueLength, numOfPeopleInBuilding etc.

Any help would be great.

An event queue could be a queue of events ordered by time. The next event would be at the top of the queue.
When an event is taken off the queue, the "current time" is set to the event's time. When a new event is added to the queue it is inserted into the queue according to it's time to be done.

The simulation driver removes the next event from the queue, sets the current time, does the event and then loops back to get the next event from the queue and do it again.

It could be something like this:
define variables, etc
add initial events to queue in time order
begin loop
get next event from queue
set current time to event's time
process the event >> could include adding new events to queue
end loop

The "add initital events to queue in time order" part is what I am confused with, the rest I hopefully can handle. An event being... goToElevator ? How do I add that to a queue? And by queue, do you mean a list that holds a list of something that I can access by its index?

I am quite a beginner in Java, so a lot of terms and few basics I still don't understand as of yet.

The PriorityQueue class will take care of the ordering of events in the queue.
Define a class for your events and extent it for the different types of events you need.

PriorityQueue is a java SE class.
The "timestamp" sounds like the time value that would be used to order the queue.

check if a person is "busy"

I'm not sure how that logic fits in. If there is an event for that person, it will be on the queue. There are no events outside of those on the queue. There would not be any checking for a person to be busy by the event loop. There might be checking done by a statistics measuring routine that would gather stats for all the actors in the simulation.

Is this the only possible way

I'm sure there are many different ways.
I'd think the simulation would NOT require mulithreading.