Problem
An airport is developing a computer simulation of air-traffic control that handles events such as landings and takeoffs. Each event has a time-stamp that denotes the time when the event occurs. The simulation program needs to efficiently perform the following two fundamental operations:
• Insert an event with a given time-stamp (that is, add a future event).
• Extract the event with smallest time-stamp (that is, determine the next event to process). Which data structure should be used for the above operations? Why?