[2024-25] COMP2432 Operating Systems

Group Project I

Released Date - 26 January 2025 (Sunday)

Submission Deadline — 31 March 2025 (Monday)

SmartPark: A Smart Parking Management System for PolyU

Using OS-Level Process Coordination

Scenario: PolyU University is an educational institution with a diverse population of students, faculty, and staff who require convenient access to parking facilities on campus. PolyU finds that there is a problem with its current parking management system designed 10 years ago. It is not flexible enough to make good utilization of the parking spaces and to satisfy most requests from its members. At PolyU, there are just 10 parking spaces available. Additionally, six essential facilities are offered in pairs to improve the overall user experience: (battery + cable), (lockers + umbrella), and (inflation service + valet parking). When a user reserves a battery, they automatically receive a cable as well. If a user reserves both a battery and a locker, they will be provided with a battery, cable, locker, and umbrella.

Currently, members of PolyU may simply make a reservation for a parking space or reserve only the parking facilities (essentials). For example, Member_A makes a reservation for parking space for their smart vehicle with a battery and charging cable. If they are both (parking + essentials) available, the reservation request is accepted. Otherwise, the reservation request is simply rejected. For instance, all the electric vehicle charging cable might have been booked by other members, so the request is rejected. In other words, the current system does not provide any alternative plan to satisfy or reschedule the reservation when some of the requested items or locations are not available for the requested time slot. Knowing that you have learned different scheduling methods from Operating Systems, the CFSO in PolyU is offering you a part-time job that you could use to satisfy your WIE. Would you mind helping CFSO at PolyU to revise its parking management system to achieve better utilization with an improved scheduling/rescheduling method? The goal is to improve the reservation situation so as to increase the PolyU’s revenue from renting these spaces to its members.

*** Note that we use only the “gcc” compiler to compile your program. In other words, ifyour program cannot be compiled by the “gcc” of department’s servers, apollo or apollo2, we simply treat this as a failed program. ***

Project Requirements

In this project, you will be given an opportunity to apply the theory of process scheduling you have learnt from    COMP2432 to a daily-life scenario and produce the Smart Parking Management System (SPMS). The project consists of the following parts:

Part I

Develop a program that allows users to add details of a booking (name, parking slot number, date, time, duration, and/or calless etc.) to the schedule. Besides the standard line by line input approach, SPMS should be able to read in batch files which containing the booking requests, i.e. one or more than one booking requests are stored in such batch files.

Note that the one who initiates for the booking is called the “client” or the “requester” and those others involved in the booking are called “staff”. This part of the program module is referred to as the Input Module.

Part II

Extend the program developed in Part I with a scheduler to generate timetables for all bookings (e.g. available parking spots, and members booking/reservation records). The scheduler will implement several scheduling algorithms similar to those covered in lectures. This is the called the Scheduling Kernel, within the Scheduling Module.

Part III

Augment the program with the facilities to print booking schedule for available parking slots and related additional facilities and equipment in Part II. Those rejected bookings should all be included. This constitutes the Output Module.

Part IV

Provide the program with the ability to generate a summary report to analyze the results produced in Part III. Compare the different schedules (generated from different algorithms) and find out which one would make the best use of the three parking slots. Your program should preferably be able to process N parking slots (N = 3 in the existing case) to cope with the expansion of PolyU in the near future. It should also be preferably able to handle more resource types in future. By the way, an outstanding (rejected) list may also be included in this report for those requests that cannot be scheduled. This final module is the Analyzer Module.

Part V

Augment the program SPMS to check whether or not the required facilities are available. If so, it assigns a priority on each booking. For example, if a parking is booked for a car and it should be equipped with a battery and charging cables, the battery and cables will be reserved for that booking with a higher priority. Even though the battery and charging cables have been reserved for another booking but without using a parking, i.e. someone reserves only the two pieces of equipment by that moment, the booking would be then rejected. Of course, you may have other assumptions on how the conflicting bookings are being scheduled/rescheduled, and the associated priority.

You must form a group of 4 persons (at most) for the project. The project must be implemented using the C programming language and it must be successfully executed on ANY ONE of the Linux Servers (apollo or apollo2) in the Department of Computing. You may specify to us on which Linux server your project has been executed successfully.

Implementation

User Interface: First of all, your program should provide an interface to allow the user to input the details of bookings and/or commands for the application. There are several input methods to be accepted by the system, and the system should be able to store all requests (valid and invalid). Below is an example of some inputs and outputs on a screen for reference.