Designing a collaborative cross-campus airport (or other transit) simulation project: panel discussion

In this workshop participants will design a cross-campus collaborative project built around an airport (or other transit) simulation. Computer scientists and software engineers create simulations both to understand how processes work, and to avoid catastrophes in the actual implementations of those processes. At the last CCSC-NW, an airport simulation was proposed as a promising collaborative project because it is a large, real-world problem whose implementation potentially encompasses many disciplines. It makes use of multiple data structures, the potential for a nice graphical interface, and large data flows to process. The idea is an expansion of an assignment called the Airport Problem, which has been used as an intense culminating project in a Data Structures course both at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at Clark College in Vancouver, WA. The premise of the Airport Problem is to complete a single project with multiple data structures so that students gain an understanding of the reasoning behind using different data structures. The Airport Problem uses three data structures: an incoming queue for airplanes arriving at the airport (a DEAP or Min-Max Heap), an outgoing queue for airplanes which have landed and are ready to take off (a Red-Black Tree), and a lobby for passengers who arrive and whose airplanes have not yet landed (a 2-3 tree or a linked list). The project proposed in this workshop would expand the Airport Problem to include additional components such as graphics and networking. Depending on participants' interests as well as availability of data, the transit mode could also be changed from Airport to either Shipping or Trucking.