Project Description - Vehicle Hiring System(VHS)
The operations manager of a vehicle hiring company is currently using a paper based (manual) system to manage and keep track of the short term vehicle reservations made by registered customers. The company hires cars and light vans to its registered customers on a short term basis (daily) and due to the inefficiency of this system, the operations manager often faces problems in serving customers due to overbooking of hiring vehicles, inability to provide customers with the requested vehicle on time and inability to track vehicles that are not returned on time.
To overcome this issue, you are required to develop a console based application that will allow the operations manager to record and maintain reservations for hiring vehicles (currently there are only two types of vehicles, cars and light vans, later there can be more types).
The operations manager has provided a registered customer list and hiring vehicle list in text files.
The system should have a simple menu as below.
1. Show available vehicles
2. Reserve a vehicle for a customer
3. Show hires for a customer
4. Show hires for a vehicle
5. Show not returned (overdue) vehicles
6. Return vehicle from hire
7. Exit
The current manual system operates as follows.
1. Show available vehicles
Depending on the customer request all available cars or vans are shown with all details.
2. Reserve a vehicle for a customer
Having shown the list of available vehicles the customer requests to reserve his/ her preferred vehicle. The manager will check if the vehicle is available during the requested time and if so a vehicle reservation is made on behalf of the customer.
3. Show hires for a customer
The operations manager looks at the vehicle reservation sheets for each vehicle to check if a given customer id is present in those sheets and creates a report of vehicle hiring records for that particular customer.
4. Show hires for a vehicle
The operations manager looks at the reservation sheets for a particular vehicle (using the vehicle id) and creates a report of hiring records for that vehicle.
5. Show not returned (overdue) vehicles
To check for not returned vehicles, the operations manager looks at the vehicle reservation sheets, checks for vehicles not returned on time (returned date/time is empty) and creates a report including the reservation details and customer details of such overdue vehicles.
6. Return vehicle from hire
When the customer id, the vehicle id and hired date and time is given, the manager finds the correct hire from the list of reservations and records the returned date and time. Finally, the total charge for the hire is calculated (including late return penalty if applicable) and shown to the customer.
You may start your design with the following recommendations.
- You must include Company, Customer, Vehicle, Reservation objects in your design
- Currently there are two vehicle types, car and van. You must have objects to represent them.
- The company has a name, a registered customer list and a hiring vehicle list
- A customer has a customer id, name and category (premium, standard and budget).
- Each vehicle has a unique registration number, model name, year of registration, fuel type and the availability for hire status (For example, when a vehicle is under repair the status is false)
- In addition to the common fields a car has engine capacity
- In addition to the common fields a van has a maximum load capacity
- A vehicle may have zero or more reservations
- Multiple reservations can be placed for the same customer
- A reservation is associated with a vehicle and a customer
- Each vehicle reservation also maintains the vehicle pickup date, pickup time, pickup location, reservation period (number of hours), returned date and returned time (recorded once the vehicle is returned).
- A reservation can be made up to 30 days in advance or just 5 hours before the hire. However premium and standard customers can make reservations just 1 hour before the hire.
- Reservations can be made between 4.00 am to 12 midnight.
- Since the vehicles are available for short term hires, reservation period cannot extend 15 hours. However premium customers are allowed to make reservations up to 20 hrs.
- Reservations must be displayed sorted by pickup date and pick up time
- Late vehicle returns of less than 1 hour will not be charged. Any vehicle returns exceeding one hour grace period will be charged by the hourly rate of the vehicle (For example, if late by 4 hrs, late penalty = 4 * hourly rate of the vehicle)
- The hourly rate for a car is $10.
- The hourly rate for a van is $15.
Start with the above but revise and improve your designaccordingly to improve usability.
Suggested steps
Part A.
1. Do initial design on paper
a. A class Diagram (without attributes and operations)
b. A class Diagram (with attributes and operations)
c. Rough sequence diagrams where it is not clear how a use case might be achieved (Note: You do not have to submit the sequence diagrams)
2. Discuss your design with your tutor and get feedback.
3. Make adjustments to your design as needed.
Part B.
1. Write code for each class (not the console UI at this stage)
a. Build upon the start-up code that is given.
2. Test and revise as necessary.
Part C.
1. Build the User Interface.
2. Code each use case
3. Compile, test and debug in after every method you write.
Part D.
1. Define where preconditions should be checked
2. Add precondition and any error handling/ validations after you have the basic system working.
3. Leave saving to a file until you have a basic system working
4. Once the basic system is working implement file reading/ writing functionalities (include error handling for file operations)
Part E.
1. Review all requirements and make sure all work has been done.
Part F.
1. Thoroughly test and fix as necessary.
2. Refactor in little increments, not in big blocks
Expectations
A. Your design must include and effectively demonstrate a good understanding of inheritance.
This is to be done by
- Including a Vehicle superclass
- Including subtypes for Car and Van
- Taking advantage of the inheritance relationship to reduce code duplication
- Using polymorphism effectively
B. You are required to save all object data between each execution to files.
This is to be done by
- Writing object data to a comma(",") delimited file before closing down the application
- Reading object data from files and building all objects before the user interface is displayed.
- Handle errors that can be caused by file reading/ writing
C. Demonstrate how to implement an interface by making reservations sortable.
D. Produce a Quality Product
- Methods should have precondition checking
- The program must be of a professional standard.
- It must be an OO design and must use inheritance and polymorphism effectively
- All classes must follow the style guide in the text book
- Javadoc is required
- All instance variables must be private (include public getters/ setters to access them)
- The program must work reliably
- Keep an eye on the overall program performance in terms of system resources/ memory usage
Attachment:- Project 2.zip