M.Sc. in Mobile & Ubiquitous Computing

Here is one of the assignments we got in the first week!

Project Description (Updated November 5, 2010)

The scenario for this system is a (real!) remote encampment in northern Scandinavia. The encampment can only be reached by helicopter, and is serviced by three private helicopter companies providing access to the nearest town. Visitors and residents can book passage in or out of the encampment through any helicopter company. The number of seats on a helicopter flight is very limited and the companies are collectively responsible for satisfying demand, and must load-share as necessary.

You have to design, build, test and demonstrate a distributed booking system for the helicopter companies.

The focus of the project is on choosing an appropriate organization of the system and suitable algorithms for ticket booking and cancellation. The prototype implementation should use only sockets for communication between the parts of the system and should be written in Java. Your design may ignore security and availability concerns — specifically you may assume that nodes and disks do not fail but you should allow for the possibility of communication failure. You need only provide a rudimentary user interface. However, in designing the system you should also consider that such a system might have to scale to support different deployments.
Completing the Assessment

You should attempt the project individually. The deliverables for the project are a report including:

* a detailed specification of your system
* a description of the system functional and technical architecture
* a description of the system design including structural and behavioural diagrams for important algorithms
* a test plan and the results of your testing
* your project diary detailing how your spent your time working on the project on an hour-by-hour basis
* a summary of your achievements.

and, of course, a working system that addresses the requirements outlined above. The report should focus on the structure of the system and the main algorithms used with an emphasis on how they enable scalability.

As a guideline, the first three items on the list above should be completed during the first three weeks of the semester (one per week).
Marking Scheme

The marking scheme is designed to encourage you to get your project working and delivered on time. If your project fails to meet the criteria, you will be required to resubmit it the next week. If you get it working on time, you'll get 100%. For each week you are delayed after the deadline, you lose 10% of the available marks. However, at the time of submission, or each week thereafter, if you are not deemed to have made sufficient effort, you will get nothing.

1. The initial deadline for completion of the project is Friday the 19th of November 2010; students who submit an acceptable solution at this deadline will achieve a mark of 100% on demonstration of their submitted solution running on a network of computers.
2. Students who do not submit the required deliverables on time or whose submission is deemed insufficient on demonstration will lose 10% of the available marks at each subsequent deadline until they submit an acceptable solution. The latest possible date for submitting an acceptable solution to pass the course is the 14th of Janaury 2011 when at most a mark of 40% will be achievable.
3. Students who do not make an adequate attempt to submit the deliverables on time, or as soon as possible thereafter, will receive a mark of 0%.

Submission Instructions and Deadlines

The deliverables for the project, excluding the source code, should be submitted in hard copy with a spiral binding to the School Reception before 4.00pm on the advertised deadline. The code required to run your solution should be submitted along with soft copies of the other deliverables in a single zip file, named with your full name (e.g., "JosephBangle.zip"), to Mike Brady with the subject line: 'CS7050 Submission' before 4.00 pm on the advertised deadline. Deadlines are strict.

Demonstrations will take place on Tuesdays at 1.00pm in Room WR2.1 (be sure your code runs there!).