Honors Project CSE 3318 - Shortes Paths

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

Requirements

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
GLOBAL VARIABLES are not allowed.

Presentation

Present your work to instructor by the demo deadline (see top of page).
When you finished the project and are ready to present it, contact the instructor to arrange a day and time to present. The quality of the presentation will be graded out of 10 points, but the presentation itself is mandatory and will be used by the instructor to determine your understanding of the problem and the solution. For example, if during the presentation you do not know what the algorithm does at any specific step or why it does that, you would not pass the entire project. You should present the project as soon as you are done with the code, while it is all still fresh in your mind.
During the presentation, you will:

give applications of this algorithm
demo all components of the project
present the method (general algorithm) and show how it works (on paper). Use visualization tools (it can be simply drawing on paper).
open the source code and explain which piece of code implements specific parts of the method you are implementing
discuss implementation choices, and
lessons learnt.

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.

Due Dates

Canvas project submission due Monday November 17, 11:59pm or earlier (as soon as it is ready)
Project presentation, 20-30 minutes, due Monday-Thursday, November 17 - November 21 (or earlier), scheduled as a separate meeting. After submitting the project, contact the instructor to schedule a meeting time.
This algorithm is presented in class at the end of the semester (after the due date for the honors project.) You should study it on your own before before we get to it in class.

How to submit

The assignment should be submitted via Canvas. Submit a ZIPPED directory called honors_project_sp.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: MANDATORY 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. The presentation is mandatory. A project will not be approved/passed without a presentation. (The 10 points are for the quality of the presentation.)
(-50) points: No presentation. Project does not pass.
(-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.