Fundamentals of Database Systems - Assignment Example

Fundamentals of Database Systems Submitted to, Submitted By, of the Submitted on, [May 29 BUSINESS DESCRIPTION An online auction mechanism is intended to be demonstrated that would attract sellers and buyers of vehicles. The system will be a reliable e-commerce system and will provide opportunity for online sales through auctions. Both the seller and the buyers will be the customers of the system. The system will maintain the personal information of both participants. After registering a vehicle by a seller, the bidder will be able to bid on it until the bidding time expires. All bidders will have equal opportunity to increase the bid with equal rate i.e 100 $ for car and 50 $ for motorcycle. After ending the bidding process, the bids will be evaluated and decision will be made accordingly. The bidder with highest bid among all the other bidders will win the vehicle auction; however, the biding price must be greater than the base price as provided by the seller. The successful bidder will be notified by the system automatically then he has to perform visit to the vehicle and payment will be made. In case of the failure of the auction i.e. the highest bid could not cross the minimum price of the vehicle or in case of no bid, the system will automatically notify the seller about the situation and the vehicle information will be removed in both cases. Such system will allow purchasers to have a fair market survey and will provide ample vehicle selection opportunities. Due to the effectiveness of system both the purchaser and seller would not be able to acquire undue benefits in any case. With the optimized vehicle price (as desired by the seller) the bidder will not have to pay exorbitantly. 1.1 Scope The proposed system revolves around a business scenario in which the auction of cars and motorcycles is being held online. The domain of the system would span from the seller of the vehicles to the buyer of the vehicles to the vehicles themselves and to the payment transaction that would eventually take place. The scope of the system is limited by time restrictions that bind each vehicle permitting it to remain available for auction only for a certain period of time. 1.2 Objectives The objective of the systems is to create an interactive automated environment that would provide the provision of facilitating the processing related to an online auction system. The system is proposed to act as a central place where the main happening of the vehicle auction scenario would be taking place. It would enable the sellers to register their vehicles for being auctioned out. Similarly the interested buyers would be able to register themselves as proposed buyers if they are intending to bid for a vehicle from the vehicle auction company. The management of bids and the increase of their respective bid costs at the introduction of every new bid for a specific vehicle is also one of the objectives of the proposed. Thus, it may be said that it aims at providing a fluent means of interaction between the buyers and the sellers of the system taking heed of the time and cost requirements/restrictions that bind the system. The vehicles purchase/selling system will work on the basis of online auctions, bidders will increase the bid and the system will monitor the auction end time. At the end of auction period highest bidder will be the winner and subsequent notifications to the respective seller and bidder will be generated by the system automatically. The online auction management system will attract both purchasers and sellers to use it. The system in turn, will get benefited from both the participants. The proposed system will not only provide an operational platform for such buying, but also maintains the bidder and seller profiles in order to produce future follow ups. The system will comprise of the following core modules. A brief summary is provided with each module. Customer (Seller/Bidder) Profiling: This module maintains and manages the details of each purchaser (bidder) and seller. The storage is helpful in discriminating the regular and new users in order to hit the target customers for future promotions. Credible sellers would a kind of asset for company’s reputation. Online Auction: This lies at the core of the whole system. It will comprise of the bidding mechanism i.e. the proper increments in bid values with respective bidding is managed by this system. The module will keep the system consistent and it has to be robust enough to maintain the reliability of the whole portal. Bidding Evaluation Mechanism: Once the bidding seizes (due to the expiry of auction duration), this module decides success and failure of respective auction. Following to the decision process the same module notifies the highest bidder (in case of success) and the seller (in both cases) accordingly. The proposed system is a bespoke because the system demands specific features within it. Moreover there are chances of future extensions in the auction mechanism due to the customer retention and offering strategies. With packages installed incorporation of extended business model will be a challenge. BUSINESS RULES Constraints that bind the vehicle auction system are business rules that are as follows, a) A specific vehicle can be made available for auction only for a certain period, which is maximum 30 days with respect to the current scenario. b) The minimum number of days that a vehicle needs to stay available for auction is ten days. It cannot be taken off from its ‘available for auction’ status before that. c) At each subsequent bid for a specific car, the cost of the bid would be incremented by $100. d) Similarly, the cost of a motorcycle would be increased by $50 at each subsequent bid for it. e) A vehicle will always be associated with at least a seller. A seller may place multiple vehicles for bidding but multiple sellers cannot place a particular vehicle. f) For a bidder to bid there must be at least one respective vehicle. On the other hand, it is not mandatory for vehicle to have a bidder. g) A bidder may bid for more than one vehicle. Similarly, multiple bidders may bid for a single vehicle. STEP WISE Development of ER Diagram. Figures 1.0 thru 1.3 exhibit the basic entity relationship diagrams for the Online Car/Motorcycle auction system with subsequent description. Figure 1.0 illustrates three entities in all namely Seller, Vehicle and Bidder. The relationship between the Seller and Vehicle is of one – many type with the cardinality constraints mentioned above as business rules i.e. for a vehicle to be placed for auction a seller is needed at least. A seller may place multiple vehicles but more than one seller cannot represent a single vehicle. The relationship between Bidder and Vehicle is of type many – many. This relationship needs a further decomposition that is illustrated in Figure 1.1. Figure 1.1 illustrates the decomposition of Bidder – Vehicle relationship by introducing a new entity namely Bidding Transaction. For a bidding transaction to happen, existence of a bidder and a respective vehicle is mandatory. A vehicle may have many or no bids through bidding while a bidder would always bid for at least a vehicle. Bidder may bid for multiple vehicles as well. Figure 1.2 represents the comprehensive entity relationship diagram of online car/motor cycle auction system. ENHANCED ENTITY RELATIONSHIP DIAGRAMS The EER for online car/motorcycle auction system can easily be understood with the Entity types and sub types illustrated in figure 2.0 and 2.1. Figure 2.0 illustrates that Seller and Bidder both are considered as customers for the online auction system. Therefore they are considered as sub type of Customer Entity with their specific properties. A seller can place vehicles for auction whereas the bidder can only bid. Figure 2.1 illustrates the sub types of vehicle as Car and Motorcycle. The logical relations presented in the next section are established after taking into account the super and sub types specification mentioned above. LOGICAL RELATIONS Customer (Customer ID, Customer Name, Customer Address, Customer Contact, Email, Type, Date of Registration, Business Details) The Customer ID acts as a primary key. The type attribute indicates whether the customer is a seller or a bidder. Vehicle (Vehicle ID, Date of Registration, Time of Registration, Vehicle type, Registration No, Model, Make, Age, Mileage, Demanded Price, No of Transfers, Registered by, Current Bid Value, Status, Duration of Stay) Vehicle ID acts as a primary key. Vehicle type indicates whether it is a car or a motor cycle. No of Transfers indicate that how many users have used this vehicle as owners. The attribute “Registered by” acts as a foreign key and holds the Customer ID of seller that places the vehicle for auction. Current Bid Value requires constant update and holds the most recently added value against a bid. The attribute Status holds a logical value indicating dormant/active statuses based on duration of stay. The attributes Status and Duration of Stay also require constant timely updates. Bidding (Bid ID, Customer ID, Vehicle ID, Bidding Date, Bidding Time) Bid ID acts as a primary key. Customer ID and Vehicle ID are foreign keys. With each new bid, the bid value of the respective vehicle increases accordingly. REFERENCES: Hoffer, J. A., Ramesh, V., & Topi, H. (2011). Modern database management. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall. Kroenke, D. (2005). Database concepts. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Pearson/Prentice Hall. Elmasri, R., Navathe, S., & Elmasri, R. (2010). Database systems: Models, languages, design, and application programming. Boston, Mass: Pearson. Read More