‘D-Mash’ - a Concurrent Distributed Booking System

Abstract

Since time immemorial, man has always looked for a better way to co-exist with nature in a diverse universe. In pursuit of this, challenges such as transport problems in remote areas, latency in communication channels amongst others have been met. Today’s period reflects an era in which the universe is a digitally connected global village. Researchers and scientists have devised ways of solving communication and movement problems to achieve co-existence. Communication has now been made possible through technologies such as teleconferencing without moving or meeting in a central place but as distributed entities all over the world. Despite this happening, new technologies come with challenges hence communication in a distributed and concurrent context is a problem. The aims of this project was to investigate the impact of automated distribution and concurrency on Service Quality and develop a practical solution to a real-world concurrency problem in a distributed bus seat booking environment which also acted as an aid in our investigation. This solution was a concurrent distributed booking prototype that was developed for a local Bus Company. It employed the action research design where data was collected and analysed, from a sample size of 1 bus company amongst a population of approximately 18 reputable bus companies and 5 respondents amongst a sample population of approximately 8 respondents, using the simplified random sampling technique. From the analysis of the results, it was found out that the probability of double-booking a seat in a distributed environment was reduced to 0 hence achieving concurrency which improved the quality of service rendered using the system that was developed using distributed computing and concurrency techniques. Keywords: Distributed Systems; Action Research; Web Services; Concurrency Control; Middleware; Synchronisation