Monitoring the Number of Vacancies in a Car Parking by Using Distributed Mutual Exclusion

Abstract

A number of solutions have been proposed for the problem of mutual exclusion in distributed systems. This paper is intended to simulate a system monitoring the number of vacancies in a car parking using Ricart-Agrawala’s Distributed Mutual Exclusion Algorithm. In this proposed system, two entrances and two exits will be used. There will be a process at each entrance and exit that tracks the number of vehicles entering and leaving. Each process keeps a count of the total number of vehicles within the car parking and displays whether or not it is full. This system will be implemented to be safety (without allowing cars to enter when there is no vacancy), liveness (without taking long-time to decide whether or not more cars are allowed to enter the car parking) and concurrency (requests will be made by different processes at any time).