Santa's Workshop

The Problem

• Santa Claus sleeps in his shop up at the North Pole, and can only be wakened by either all nine reindeer being back from their year long vacation on the beaches of some tropical island in the
• South Pacific, or by some elves who are having some difficulties making the toys.
• One elf's problem is never serious enough to wake up Santa (otherwise, he may never get any sleep), so, the elves visit Santa in a group of three. When three elves are having their problems solved, any other elves wishing to visit Santa must wait for those elves to return.
• If Santa wakes up to find three elves waiting at his shop's door, along with the last reindeer having come back from the tropics, Santa has decided that the elves can wait until after Christmas, because it is more important to get his sleigh ready as soon as possible.
• It is assumed that the reindeer don't want to leave the tropics, and therefore they stay there until the last possible moment to return.
• They might not even come back, but since Santa is footing the bill for their year in paradise it's to the reindeer's advantage to return eventually before Christmas. However, this may also explain the alacrity with which presents are delivered, since the reindeer can't wait to get back to where it is warm.
• The penalty for the last reindeer to arrive is that it must notify Santa while the others wait in a warming hut before being harnessed to the sleigh.

Team Responsibility

You are to design and implement a solution to this problem, in Java, for one year. After the delivery of the presents for the year, Santa's return to the North Pole, and the departure of the reindeer for the tropics, your program must terminate.

We strongly suggest that you implement a test bed allowing you control over the arrival of elves and reindeer, and Santa fixing problems and delivering toys, and use it to collect some statistics to demonstrate the behaviour of your program.

You should make and document plausible assumptions about arrival times etc, noting that reindeer only arrive near to Christmas, while elves may arrive at any time (hint: insert a relatively large initial delay for each reindeer). Experiment with different assumptions to see their effect, and document the results. In addition to the well-structured and well-documented Java source code, you must write a report that details your design (especially decisions related to concurrency), alternatives you considered, and the results of your experiments (e.g., were any race conditions uncovered? were you able to correct these?)

Submission

Submit your team's solution to the Project 1 - Santa dropbox by due date and time shown in the course schedule. The submission is to consist of one ZIP file, santa.zip, containing the following:

• Java source file Main.java, with a class Main that has the public static void main method to launch your program.
• Java source files, in the default package, for the other classes in your solution (Santa.java, Elf.java and Reindeer.java at a minimum).
• A README.txt file giving instructions as to how your program is to be executed. Include in this any mechanisms for interacting with the program, and configurable constants and the source file where they reside, and a description of the output format produced.
• A PDF file Report.pdf addressing the issues and questions in section Team Responsibility.
• There must be no directories in the zip file - everything must be at the top-most level.
  

Acknowledgements