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On the generalized dining philosophers problem

Oltea Mihaela Herescu·Catuscia Palamidessi
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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.

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Oltea Mihaela Herescu, Catuscia Palamidessi. 2001-09-03. On the generalized dining philosophers problem. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0109003

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