Description
The International Wildlife Management Organization (IWMO) supervises the transport of various
species of animals between zoos. Frequently, various species must be shipped from one zoo to
another. To minimize expenses, the IWMO tries to use as few containers as possible, but there are
important restrictions on the species that can be transported together:
o Carnivores and herbivores cannot be transported together, unless they are both domesticated
o Any animal which is part of the endangered species list must be transported by itself, since the
IWMO cannot take the risk of possible disease transmission if transported in close quarters with
other animals
o Animals which are in the “near threatened” or “vulnerable categories” cannot be transported with
any carnivores (just in case the carnivore gets really hungry …)
You are asked to write software that, given a list of animals to be transported, finds the smallest
number of containers needed to complete the shipment. Evidently, this problem can be attacked using
the graph-coloring backtracking algorithm studied in class. Keep in mind that, although the scheduling
restrictions will allow your program to prune the search tree significantly, the solution can be very
computationally intensive if the number of animals being shipped is large. Your solution is to be
implemented as a class named AnimalTransport containing the following public methods:
AnimalTransport(String filename): a constructor to read in the data from a text file, which
contains information about every species in the IWMO inventory. The file is in the .csv (commaseparated values) format and contains one line per species, including the following fields:
o Species name
o Classification: carnivore, herbivore, insectivore, or omnivore
o Order
o Conservation status, expressed as a two-letter code: en (endangered), vu (vulnerable), nt (near
threatened), cd (conservation dependent), lc (Least Concern), do (domesticated), ne (not
evaluated)
o Adult body weight (in kilograms)
A sample file named iwmo1.csv has been provided for testing. However, note that your class
should handle files of any size, as long as the data is in the expected format.
int minContainers(String animals): returns the minimum number of containers needed to
transport the animals in the string passed as argument. The string contains a series of species
names separated by commas.
String getListing(String animals): returns ONE sample transport listing that utilizes the
minimum number of containers needed to transport the animals in the string passed as argument.
For convenience, you may simply label the containers: Container 1, Container 2, …, Container n,
followed by the names of the species to be included in the container. The precise String format is
left to you, but be sure everything is labeled and formatted attractively.
The IWMOTest.java program and sample text files are available for partial testing. Submit your
AnimalTransport.java (and any other .java files developed as part of your solution) to Mimir for testing.
