A Service-Oriented Product Lines Implementation
Approach
Travel Agency Product Line Case Study: Approach Evaluation
This case study was based on the development of a service-oriented product line in the domain of travel reservations, herein named travel agency product line. The travel reservation domain is similar to the libraries domain (R4ll) described here. In the R4ll, the main goal consisted of the management of items, for example, books, theses, multimedia materials, among others. Moreover, the R4ll allows the manipulation of items through the actions of loans, repayment and reservations. On the other hand, the travel agency product line offers for its customers the benefit of planning and reserving travel arrangements on the Internet. Accordingly, such similarity between these two domains is the main motivation to use the travel reservation domain in the context of this case study. In addition, it is important to stress that the travel agency product line project was developed in an academic lab at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil.
Furthermore, the travel agency product line development involved the life cycle phases ranging from business process analysis to implementation concerns. For validation purposes, the business process models, the domain use cases, the architecture reference and the feature model of the travel agency were analyzed. The feature model was defined for capturing commonalities and variabilities of the domain, in which eleven features and three variation points could be identified.
Travel Agency Overview
The travel reservation service-oriented product line should offer its customers the benefit of planning and reserving travel arrangements on the Internet. This product line should fit the requirements of similar travel agencies. Thus, the Travel Agency term will be used to describe this product line throughout this document. The travel agency product line should achieve four key goals through the development and deployment of its services as described next:
The product line should allow customers to submit travel itineraries and payment information to the product line services using a Web interface;
The travel agency services should automatically obtain and reserve the appropriate services for the airline, hotel or vehicle according to the customer itineraries;
Its services should perform compensation operations for canceling itinerary failures; and
It should automatically return confirmation or failure of all reservations back to the customer once the processing of the itinerary is complete.
In this sense, different products in the line will be customized to fit the requirements of specific travel agencies, e.g., from small travel agencies that deal with airline ticket reservations to bigger travel agencies that provide services to reserve airline tickets, accommodation and vehicle. These functionalities were selected because they are essential for the travel agency domain. The motivation to use a service-oriented architecture in this product line is the ability to allow travel agencies to expose their business processes through services, allowing integration with services exposed by their business partners. This fact will give these travel agencies a significant strategic advantage and help them to streamline their business.
The next pages will present the most important work products (artifacts) generated for this case study. In addition, as the goal of the case study was to evaluate the approach proposed in this research, we provide through the link below the entire code produced for implementing an initial version of the travel agency product line using the SOPLE-IM approach as a guide.
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