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Room Booking System
and Data Structures
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Comparative essay on finding the data structure that is most suitable for a potential room booking system for McGill Faculty of Engineering
Abstract
McGill University Engineering Faculty holds many clubs and committees. However, when they have meetings, they often get room conflictions with other clubs or committees. In order to solve this problem, McGill Engineering Undergraduate Society Website Committee came up with the idea of creating a room booking system for all clubs and committees in McGill Faculty of Engineering. Before programming anything, it is essential to decide on which data structure is the most proficient for a room booking system. Indeed, some data structures are more efficient than others depending on the use. In this essay, we will compare five data structures (regular arrays, stacks, queues, trees and hash tables), in order to find the most efficient data structures for a room booking system. Stacks and queues seem like a good choice when it comes to adding or removing an object. Though, for a fast search and easy access to the information, Hash Table seems like the best because its maximum delay time to find an object is the shortest of all five. Since we rarely change the number of rooms or the name of the rooms but the search engine used in this room booking system will be used every time the user books a room, it is more logical to conclude that Hash Table is the most efficient yet more convenient data structure for a potential room booking system in the McGill Faculty of Engineering.
Introduction
As an active member of McGill University Engineering Undergraduate Society Website Committee, I felt that it was my duty to use this opportunity to conduct a research which will eventually be helpful to McGill engineering students. The website committee had an idea of creating a room...