A Travel Agency System

An example for the Model-driven Web Engineering Workshop (MDWE 2005)

This example describes the process followed by a travel agency for selling travels to its customers. It is expected that a Web Application provides these services electronically.

For simplicity reasons we will concentrate just on transportation services, which can be carried out using planes, trains, cars, boats, or combinations of those. Accommodation, tourist packages, excursions, and other services also sold at travel agencies are not contemplated here.

The travel agency can be regarded as an open distributed system. It uses some services from other systems in order to fulfil the customer requirements.

The main players involved in the system, together with their main objectives and tasks, are as follows.

• The Customer, who describes his or her trip and may establish some constraints and conditions on it.
• The Personal Travel Assistant is the only entity that interacts with the Customer. It receives the requests from the Customer, tries to find a trip that matches the Customer requirements, and help refining the requests until a match is found or the Customer gives up. From the Customer perspective, it represents the travel agency. For locating the requested services, the Personal Travel Assistant interacts with the Broker Agents that work with the travel agency. A travel agency usually works with many different Broker Agents. The Personal Travel Assistant is a person in case of a conventional travel agency, but in this case it represents the interface to the customer of the computerized system (i.e., Web application).
• A Broker Agent is an entity that uses the services provided by the Transportation Companies, combining them to implement a requested trip. A Broker Agent usually works with many different travel agencies, and with many different Transportation Companies. It represents the main business logic of the application, and can be either external Broker Agents (e.g., other Travel Agencies) or internal processes (in case the system also implements a Broker Agent).
• The Transportation Companies are the entities that provide the actual transportation services, or rent the transportation mechanisms. Examples of Transportation Companies include commercial airlines (such as Iberia, BA, or Air France), boat and ferry companies, car rentals, etc.
• The Financial Companies are the entities that provide the payment services, usually credit card companies (AMEX, VISA, etc.) and Banks that offer such kind of services to Customers.

The operations of the travel agency are as follows.

1. The Customer provides a description of the required trip to the Personal Travel Assistant, including personal constraints and preferences. The trip description contains the cities of origin and destination, as well as the departure and return dates. For one-way trips, only the departure cities and dates are required. Constraints on the trip may include bounds on the total price of the trip, duration of the trip itself, and any undesired transportation method (e.g. the customer does not like planes). Preferences may include the preferred transportation mechanisms for each way, as well as rules that can be applied to the set of acceptable service offers to yield an ordered sequence of service offers.
2. The Personal Travel Assistant receives the request from the Customer, checks that it is well formed, and selects the Broker Agents that work with them and that can service the trip.
3. The Personal Travel Assistant interacts with each Broker Agent, asking them for an offer that fulfils the Customer’s requested trip.
4. Each Broker Agent may work with several Transportation Companies, asking them to provide an offer for the requested service. If the offer matches the customer requirements, the Broker Agent will ask the Transportation Company to temporarily book the service, and pass the offer (with the corresponding overhead in case of external Brokers) to the Personal Travel Assistant of the Travel Agency. In case the service has to be split (e.g. a plane, a train and a boat need to be used), the Broker Agent will be the one in charge of dividing it into separate services and ask different Transportation Companies for separate offers. If a complete service can be successfully put together with all the Transportation Companies’ offers, the Broker Agent will temporarily book them, and the separate offers will be then combined to provide a single offer to the Personal Travel Assistant.
5. The Personal Travel Assistant will then sort the list of all suitable trips and quotations received from all the Broker Agents, according to the Customer preferences, and provide that sorted list to the Customer for him or her to choose one.
6. The Customer may either select one of the offered trips, reject them all and quit, or refine his or her requirements and start the process again.
7. In case the Customer selects one of the trips, the Customer will provide the credit card details to the Personal Travel Assistant, who will process the payment through the corresponding Financial Company. Once the payment is correct, the Personal Travel Assistant will notify the corresponding Broker Agent to confirm the booking(s), who will then cascade this confirmation to the appropriate Transportation Companies. If the Personal Travel Assistant cannot process the payment (not enough credit, invalid or expired card, etc.), the Customer will be asked to either re-enter his payment details, or quit.
8. In any case, the Personal Travel Assistant will notify those Broker Agents whose offers have not been selected to cancel their bookings, who will then cascade this cancellation to the appropriate Transportation Companies.
9. Once a month, the travel agency will pay each external Broker Agent for the services it has provided during the previous month. The payment will be done by ordering a money transfer to the bank account number of the Broker Agent.
10. The way Broker Agents pay their Transportation Companies depends on their particular arrangements, and is not part of this specification.

Finally, the accessibility requirements of the system are as follows.

1. Customers may access the system using three different kinds of devices: browsers, PDAs, and mobile phones. Their characteristics constrain the possible interfaces and functionality that need to be offered to each one. Potentially, the application will have to interact with new kinds of devices, although their characteristics are unknown at this moment.
2. Frequent customers will be able to store and modify their preferences, and will be eligible to discounts depending on the agency policies.