Data Structures
Project #2
CALENDAR SCHEDULING
REQUIREMENTS:
A certain charity recruits twelve volunteers each year to spearhead its fundraising efforts.
Each volunteer is assigned one month to take the lead organizing events. As these are
volunteers, the charity does it best to accommodate everyone’s schedule as much as
possible. Before the year begins, each volunteer is asked to give his or her top three
choices for a month to serve. These preferences are likely to overlap. For example:
Susan John Mary
first choice December December March
second choice February March May
third choice April February April
Obviously both Susan and John cannot be assigned December; one of them will need to
be assigned a different month. The best possible assignment for the three volunteers
(ignoring the other nine for the moment) would be
Susan = February John = December Mary = March
as John and Mary get their first choice and Susan receives her second. For twelve
volunteers, the task above is humanly unmanageable, and so the charity has contacted
you to automate this process for them.
The charity proposes that the following point system be used when determining the
desirability of a particular month assignment to its volunteers:
3 points for each volunteer assigned his or her first choice
2 points for each volunteer assigned his or her second choice
1 point for each volunteer assigned his or her third choice
0 points for each volunteer not assigned any of his or her choices
Thus, each of the 12! possible assignments of months to volunteers will have a
desirability between 0 and 36. Your task is to find the best calendar assignment.
SPECIFICATIONS:
Design and implement a program to find the best possible calendar assignment for the
charity’s volunteers. Your authored code MUST be a client of the UnsortedType class
presented in the textbook.
INPUT:
• The names of the twelve volunteers followed by their month preferences. The
information for each volunteer will be listed on a single line in the file
"volunteers.dat" in the following format:
where is a string of up to 20 characters, and , , and
are integers between 1 and 12.
OUTPUT:
• A listing of the best possible calendar assignments found so far as your
program progresses through the permutations.
EXAMPLE OUTPUT:
SCORE: 12
January Yuen
February Bill
March Steve
April Alice
May Susan
June Julio
July Gary
August Mike
September Mary
October Rich
November Shilpa
December Ann
SCORE: 14
January Steve
February Julio
March Shilpa
…
DELIVERABLES:
• Source code
• Any data files you create and use in your test plan
• a sample run of your program with the best assignment of months for the 12
volunteers
• an implemented test plan