A simulation of the classic Dining Philosophers problem implemented in C using threads and mutexes. This project was developed to explore concepts in concurrency, synchronization, and thread safety while building a deterministic, deadlock-free simulation.
To simulate a group of philosophers sitting at a table, each alternating between thinking, eating, and sleeping. The simulation must:
- Prevent deadlocks and starvation
- Log each philosopher’s actions precisely
- Terminate cleanly when a philosopher dies or the simulation ends
- Multi-threaded Simulation
- Each philosopher is represented by an independent thread.
- Fork Control with Mutexes\
- Shared forks are protected by mutexes to ensure mutual exclusion and prevent data races.
- Time-sensitive Logging
- Each action (take fork, eat, sleep, think, die) is logged with a timestamp (in ms) relative to the simulation start.
- Death Detection
- A monitoring thread observes the state of each philosopher and stops the simulation if a philosopher has not eaten in time.
- Custom Parameters
- The simulation behavior can be configured via command-line arguments:
./philo number_of_philosophers time_to_die time_to_eat time_to_sleep [number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat]
- The simulation behavior can be configured via command-line arguments: