Homework: Due October 31, 2007
Problem 1: Concurrent programming in Java
Consider an airplane control system which is composed of three control signals:
Pitch (movement of the note up or down)
Roll (rotation along a longitudinal axis)
Yaw (rotation along a vertical axis)
Implement an AirplaneControl class, which encapsulates these values. Implement five
other classes, implementing the Runnable interface which can read or write these values
as follows:
BlackBox – can read the values (and record them)
Pilot – can read and write
CoPilot – can read and write
QualifiedPassenger – can read and write
AutoPilot – can read and write.
Discuss the issues of atomicity in this application. Implement an application which
implements the scenario from the movie “Airplane!”:
-the airplane is controlled by the Pilot, the CoPilot reads the controls.
-the Pilot falls sick, the plane is taken over by the CoPilot
-the CoPilot falls sick.
-after some time while the plane is not under the control of any thread, the AutoPilot
takes over.
-the QualifiedPassenger takes over from the AutoPilot, lands the plane and relinguishes
control.
-the AutoPilot takes over the plane, which takes off again.
-during all this time, the BlackBox records the actions.
Naturally, this is not quite a fully specified problem. I leave it to your creativity of how
do you implement, for instance, the “handling over control” problem. Also, you might
want to consider the effect of the environment: for instance, there might be random
changes in the pitch, roll, yaw due to wind, etc. The pilots need to correct this to get back
to the values they want. But certainly you want to make sure that there will be no
situation where the Pilot changes the pitch and the AutoPilot changes the roll. Also, the
BlackBox always needs to perform a consistent reading, so you should never record the
result of a partial write.
