DSAA204 - Data Structure and Algorithms Assignment - Kent Institute

Assignment Task

Case Study

To help monitor climate change and to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts in remote areas, NSW state government decides to deploy nearly 1000 weather stations in remote areas. These weather stations collect data from a set of instruments that measure temperature and pressure, sunshine, rainfall, wind speed and wind direction. Wilderness weather stations are part of a larger system, which is a weather information system that collects data from weather stations and makes it available to other systems for processing.

The weather station includes a number of instruments that measure weather parameters such as the wind speed and direction, the ground and air temperatures, the barometric pressure and the rainfall over a 24- hour period. Each of these instruments is controlled by a software system that takes parameter readings periodically and manages the data collected from the instruments.

The weather station system operates by collecting weather observations at frequent intervals –for example, temperatures are measured every minute. However, because the bandwidth to the satellite is relatively narrow, the weather station carries out some local processing (for example searching of critical data and sorting of data for certain interval) and aggregation of the data. It then transmits this aggregated (min, max, avg, sum, count) data when requested by the data collection system. If, for whatever reason, it is impossible to make a connection, then the weather station maintains the data locally until communication can be resumed

Each weather station is battery-powered and must be entirely self-contained –there is no external power or network cables available. All communications are through a relatively slow speed satellite link, slow processing speed of device/computer, limited memory and the weather station must include some mechanism (solar or wind power) to charge its batteries. As they are deployed in wilderness areas, they are exposed to severe environmental conditions and may be damaged by animals. However, the system should transmit the aggregated data without delay and provide it to central data management system of Weather management system

Other third parties (SES Australia, News Agencies, Security Office) also want to get the information of weather on the daily basis and want to create awareness of rise in temperature in ascending order and predictive analysis of the future weather event.

Task

a) Decide the appropriate variables, keys and ranges to be used in the system. Consider the requirements mentioned above in the case study in terms of memory, processing time, and type of operations performed. Provide justifications for your recommendations.

b) Identify the appropriate data structure that can represent data as per the specified requirements. Suggested data structures should support the operations required. Also specify, how the efficiency with the help of these data structures can be achieved.

c) The operations that weather station should support.

d) Specify the algorithms for the operations that your system should support. Also, justify the choice of algorithms by providing efficiency in terms of time and memory requirements.

e) Currently the NSW government is keen to upgrade and expand the number of weather stations up to 5000 all over the state, to enhance the feature of the current weather system and more reliable predictive analysis of weather events. The state government only going to upgrade memory, battery, and processing power of the device but, network will remain same. In this situation, what type of changes can be made to data structure, operations, algorithms to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness of the current system. 

This DSAA204 – Engineering has been solved by our PHD Experts at My Uni Paper.