CarALouer provides rental of cars to its customer on a regional basis i.e. a car is attached to a regional home-base which also houses a regional office of the company. Each regional office is headed by an office manager and assisted by a head mechanic for the maintenance of cars. All rental requests are handled by office assistants.
A customer may rent a car at a particular regional office and at the end of the rental period leave it at another regional office close to his destination. The other regional office will then despatch the same or another car whenever possible to the original office. The system must keep track of all cars at all times. CarALouer would like to receive rental requests through the Internet (24 hours a day and 7 days a week), as well as over the phone and across the counter.
CarALouer wants to produce a software-based system for their business to assist them in their daily activities in performing tasks listed below:
To rent a car:- When submitting a rental request, whether online or over the counter, the customer has to provide the following details start date, duration for the rental, personal information, driving license number and credit card information. All rentals are paid via credit card and the payment must be approved by the credit card company. The system must store and update all rental requests in the regional office records and make an entry for new customers if need be.
To send out promotional offers to past customers:- The Marketing Dept. must be able to use the system for accessing customer information and send promotional offers to targeted customers via email or post-mail. Frequent customers may also receive free rental days as part of the promotional package.
Managers can add cars to the system. Cars are added when purchased by the company and attached to a home-base. Only Managers are allowed to delete cars from the system. A car is deleted from the system when sold or destroyed in an accident. The assistant/manager provides all the relevant details.
Some daily reports to be approved by manager:- Selected electronic reports should be produced by the system on a weekly or daily basis. These reports must show all rental transactions, the status of all cars currently attached to the home-base, cars sent to the garage for maintenance, turn over for the week. All these reports must be approved by the manager before being sent in XML format to the company headquarters. The system is not concerned with the processing of electronic reports at the headquarters.
To issue a notice that a car is stolen:- An office assistant may alert the system when a car has been reported to be stolen by a customer. The car's status is put to be "stolen" and the system will then automatically notify the Police to have the car placed upon the Police's stolen car list.
To alert a customer when a rented car is overdue:- the system shall alert the office assistants when a rental transaction is overdue. The system should provide the customer information required to notify the customer.
To send a car for repair or maintenance:- All returning cars are inspected by the Head Mechanic who will decide on the repair needed and allocate a mechanic for the task. Car status, repairs and parts needed must be recorded by the system. Parts can be ordered online but must be approved by the manager. Some parts routinely used for maintenance e.g. oil filters, engine oil, time-belt, tyre chambers, etc, must be kept in stock and the stock managed by the system. The system should also alert assistants when a car maintenance date is due.
To transfer a car to another regional office: - Each car is attached to a regional office as its home base. The system should allow assistant to transfer cars from one regional office to another. The system, however, should provide a feature so that all transfers be validated by a manager before being processed. A transfer may be rejected if the manager feels that there are not enough cars to handle the volume of requests. The system shall include a feature for projecting future requests on a weekly basis. The system shall take into account the increase in requests on public holidays or festive periods.
To store and manage Staff records:- The system should enable the manager to retrieve and update staff records. The system should allow the manager to check on the performance of his employees and decide on a productivity bonus to be awarded.
CarALouer rents out the following types of vehicle:
• Passenger Cars
• MotorBikes - only rented to those over 25 years of age, with a motorbike license, records engine capacity
• MiniBuses - records seating capacity
All vehicles records must contain the date of purchase, model, make, colour and license plate.
Question 1:
(a) Suggest the most appropriate generic software process model which might be used in order to produce a software-based system
for CarALouer. Give reasons for your answer.
(b) How can the event list help the systems analyst in the conceptual phase of a project?
(c) Write down a list events for CarALouer case study.
(d) Document three of the above events found in part (c). (State the entity, actor, system agent, input and output information).
Question 2:
(a) Draw an appropriate use-case model for the system described above?
(b) Write down the use-case specification for "Rent a car".
(c) Draw the Entity Access Matrix for the Entity Car.
(d) Draw an Entity Life History for the Entity Car.
Question 3:
Build an appropriate class model for the above system. You must identify all relationships including relationship multiplicities; and two attributes with two operations for each class identified.