NON LINEAR DATA STRUCTURE SIMULATION SYSTEM

Abstract

A data structure is an arrangement of data in a computer's memory or even disk storage. It is an example of several common data structures as arrays, linked lists, queues, stacks, graphs, and trees. Data structures provide a means to manage huge amounts of data efficiently, such as large databases and internet indexing services. In Non-linear data structure, every data item is attached to several other data items in a way that is specific for reflecting relationships and are not arranged in a sequential structure, like tree and graph data structures.Computer simulation is the discipline of designing a model of an actual or theoretical physical system then executing the model on a digital computer and analyzing the execution output. The aim of this research is to design non linked data structure simulator to simulate the graph structure like: graph types and representation in memory, and also tree structure operations as traversing methods, tree conversions, building Binary Search Tree (BST) and some of tree applications), because many students find difficulty in understanding various parts of this subject.With the help of this simulator, the user will be able to study and run different operations of the non linear data structure, for each operation there are some examples to show how to do the processes using step by step before executing the process practically on different trees that he(she) can construct by himself. The simulator can tell the student whether the solution is correct or not and give a chance to correct the solution to achieve a better understanding or read more examples for learning. This model can serve as a tool for teaching and helping the student to get an ideas of how a real data analysis is done inside computer. The simulator is designed with Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Programming language which is classified among the object-oriented programming languages to provide a good graphical user interface (GUI) to process the tree functions. The system has been presented on some of the arbitrators in the same field, as well as it is applied in practice on a random sample of students from the second year of the computer system department in Technical Institute of Kirkuk, which proved better understanding for graph and tree data structure and its operations