C10 - Dining Philosophers II

Benchmark C10 Dining Philosophers II  is a successor of the very general fourth benchmark C4 Dining Philosophers. The Dining Philosophers' problem is relatively easy to describe, but the philosophers' behaviour may cause interesting problems, including especially concurrent access and deadlock situations: Five philosophers are sitting around a large round table, each with a bowl of Chinese food in front of him. Between peri-ods of meditation, they may start eating whenever they want to, with their bowls being filled frequently. However, there are only five chopsticks available, one each to the left of each bowl - and for eating Chinese food one needs two chopsticks.

This process offers a wide range of modelling ap-proaches and simulation case studies – as foreseen for the original benchmark C4 Dining Philosophers. This benchmark C10 Dining Philosophers II provides better specifications for result comparisons:  I) modular and / or object-oriented model descriptions, ii) investigation of simultaneous access to resources, and iii) detection of deadlocks. For this purpose, the philosophers must follow suitably settled strategies for changing the status of meditating and eating.

This definition implicitly describes also the educational impact: modelling and simulation of concurrent events, investigation of system status as deadlock or reachability.

This benchmark addresses not only the simulation community, it is an interesting calculation task for everybody, and allows various approaches, e.g. also generic algorithmic ones. Consequently, the benchmark is a basis for various education areas, also suited for spreadsheet calculation.

Definition

F. Breitenecker, B. Schmidt

SNE 6(18), 1996, 32-33

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