English

On the generalized dining philosophers problem

Programming Languages 2007-05-23 v1

Abstract

We consider a generalization of the dining philosophers problem to arbitrary connection topologies. We focus on symmetric, fully distributed systems, and we address the problem of guaranteeing progress and lockout-freedom, even in presence of adversary schedulers, by using randomized algorithms. We show that the well-known algorithms of Lehmann and Rabin do not work in the generalized case, and we propose an alternative algorithm based on the idea of letting the philosophers assign a random priority to their adjacent forks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cs/0109003,
  title  = {On the generalized dining philosophers problem},
  author = {Oltea Mihaela Herescu and Catuscia Palamidessi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0109003},
  year   = {2007}
}