Priority Queues

Resources

1. Priority Queue Overview
2. Short paragraph overview/why to use binary heap for implementation

Takeaways:

• Priority Queues are often implemented using binary heaps.
• Accessing the highest priority item (front of the queue) is fast. O(1) (constant).
• However, enqueuing/dequeueing (adding/removing) items is slower than regular queues at O(log n) (logarithmic). This is due to items having a priority - so each time an item is introduced/removed behind the scenes a reshuffling/ordering of the items might take place.
• Priority queues often get used in graph algorithms (like Dijkstra's algorithm or Prim's algorithm). They can be useful for scheduling things as well - such as jobs/tasks. There is also an interesting Microsoft Azure article explaining the use cases/patterns for priority queues.
• Space is O(n).

As I had just learned binary heaps, priority queues were straightforward. All I needed to do to implement one was alter my previous min-heap and add a thin class for the queuing operations.

Here's the finished implementation, with test code, of a priority queue with a min-heap (smaller means higher priority). For readability, I moved the min-heap code below the priority queue and Main() method:

As always, if you found any errors in this post please let me know!