W. R. Franta
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A comparison of heaps and the TL structure for the simulation event set
Following publication of our paper [2], questions arose with respect to the superiority of the TL structure over heaps,1 particularly in the face of the remarks of Gonnet [3], concerning the use of heaps for the physical realization of the simulation event set. Gonnet's communication was in response to the Vaucher and Duval paper [5], and suggested the heap to be a more efficient structure than any proposed in [5]. As regards a comparison of heaps and the TL structure we can make the following remarks:
An efficient data structure for the simulation event set
Recently algorithms have been presented for the realization of event scheduling routines suitable for general purpose discrete event simulation systems. Several exhibited a performance superior to that of commonly used simple linked list algorithms. In this paper a new event scheduling algorithm is presented which improves on two aspects of the best of the previously published algorithms. First, the new algorithm's performance is quite insensitive to skewed distributions, and second, its worst-case complexity is O(√n), where n is the number of events in the set. Furthermore, tests conducted to estimate the average complexity showed it to be nearly independent of n.
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