Honors Project CSE 3318

Figure 1: A visual representation of the road system described in file input1.txt. Implement Dijkstra's Algorithm to find the best route between any two cities. Your program will be called find_route.c. It will ask the user for a file name and a source and a destination. Argument input_filename is the name of a text file such as input1.txt, that describes road connections between cities in some part of the world. For example, the road system described by file input1.txt can be visualized in Figure 1 shown above. You can assume that the input file is formatted in the same way as input1.txt: each line contains three items. The last line contains the items "END OF INPUT", and that is how the program can detect that it has reached the end of the file. The other lines of the file contain, in this order, a source city, a destination city, and the length in kilometers of the road connecting directly those two cities. Each city name will be a single word (for example, we will use New_York instead of New York), consisting of upper and lowercase letters and possibly underscores.

IMPORTANT NOTE: MULTIPLE INPUT FILES WILL BE USED TO GRADE THE ASSIGNMENT. FILE input1.txt IS JUST AN EXAMPLE. YOUR CODE SHOULD WORK WITH ANY INPUT FILE FORMATTED AS SPECIFIED ABOVE.

The program will compute a route between the origin city and the destination city, and will print out both the length of the route and the list of all cities that lie on that route.


     Sample run 1:
Enter filename: input.txt 
Enter origin city: Bremen 
Enter destination city: Frankfurt

distance: 455 km
route: 
Bremen to Dortmund, 234 km 
Dortmund to Frankfurt, 221 km 

     Sample run 2:
Enter filename: input.txt 
Enter origin city: London
Enter destination city: Frankfurt

distance: infinity
route: 
none

For full credit, you should produce outputs identical in format to the above two examples. The program should be able to run in debug mode as well. In that mode it will print the correspondence: vertex number - city name and will print the distance and the predecessor arrays.

The implementation must be in C.

Suggestions

Pay close attention to all specifications on this page, including specifications about output format, submission format. Even in cases where the program works correctly, points will be taken off for non-compliance with the instructions given on this page (such as a different format for the program output, wrong compression format for the submitted code, and so on). The reason is that non-compliance with the instructions makes the grading process significantly (and unnecessarily) more time consuming.

How to submit

Nov 12 - Project submission is DUE.
Nov 19 - Presentation must be completed before this date.
Dijkstra's algorithm will be presented in class, but it will be presented in the last lectures, which may be past the due dates for the project. Students should study the algorithm on their own and submit on time or even well before the due date.

The assignment should be submitted via Canvas. Submit a ZIPPED directory called honors_project.zip (no other forms of compression accepted, contact the instructor or TA if you do not know how to produce .zip files). The directory should contain source code. Including binaries that work on omega is optional. The submission should also contain a file called README, which should specify precisely:

Name and UTA ID of the student.
How the code is structured.
How to run the code, including very specific compilation instructions, if compilation is needed. Instructions such as "compile using g++" are NOT considered specific.

Insufficient or unclear instructions will be penalized by up to 10 points.

Grading

The assignment will be graded out of 100 points.
A score of 80 or higher is needed to pass the project.

6 points: students submit 2 input files created by them and the drawing for the graph corresponding to those files.
30 points: The program always finds a route between the origin and the destination, as long as such a route exists.
20 points: In addition to the above requirement, the program terminates and reports that no route can be found when indeed no route exists that connects source and destination (e.g., if source is London and destination is Berlin, in the above example).
24 points: In addition to the above requirements, the program always returns optimal routes. In other words, no shorter route exists than the one reported by the program.
10 points: complexity analysis of the given algorithm (including a brief, but clear explanation). This will be included in the README file.
10 points: project presentation to instructor. Students should contact the instructor to schedule a meeting. The presentation must be scheduled a week or more before the last day of classes for the semester. No presentation can be made in the last week of classes or after that.
(-50) points: project that crashes does not pass.
(-50) points: project that does not run on omega machines does not pass.
(-50) points: The solution must use Dijkstra's algorithm for shortest path (covered at the end of the class). Other methods are not accepted, unless explicit permission was received from the instructor and the Honors College advisors' office was notified of this change to the contract.
(-50) points: project that does not print the debugging information does not pass, even if it appears to work correct otherwise. The city name-vertex number correspondence, will be done in the order in which city names appear in the input file. E.g. For
```
     file:
Hamburg Hannover 153
Bremen Hannover 132
Luebeck Hamburg 63
END OF INPUT

     the correspondence will be
0 - Hamburg
1 - Hannover
2 - Bremen
3 - Luebeck
4 - Hamburg
```
Other negative points: penalty points will be awarded by the instructor and TA generously and at will, for issues such as: code not running on omega, submission not including precise and accurate instructions for how to run the code, wrong compression format for the submission, or other failures to comply with the instructions given for this assignment. Partial credit within each component will not be offered.