no station server should ever contain all knowledge about the whole network, timetabling data, or network connections. Each station's timetabling data, recorded in one textfile for each station, may change at any time (for example, if a bus breaks down, its next trip will be cancelled). Every query arriving at a station server (via a UDP/IP datagram) should be answered using the current up-to-date timetable information for that station. For this point, could you provide some clarification on how this might look like in testing? Would the station server process be restated with the updated information as command line arguments? Thank you

ANONYMOUS wrote: Each station-server will be reading its station's timetable information from a file on the local disk. The file's name will not change. At any time, that file's contents may be updated to provide new timetable information, that should be used for all future queries. Your project (the protocol you're designing) is not required to deliver or install/update the new timetable information. You may wish to (re)think the consequences of 'just' restarting a station-server. Hope this helps,