Assignment Detail

Assignment ID: FG133233108

Assignment:

Question: Conceptual Design

Terrific Airlines is a newly formed airline aimed at the burgeoning market of clandestine travellers (fugitives, spies, confidence tricksters, scoundrels, deadbeats, cheating spouses, politicians, etc.). Terrific Airlines needs a database to track flights, customers, fares, airplane performance, and personnel assignment. Since Terrific Airlines is promoted as a “…fast way out of town,” individual seats are not assigned, and flights of other carriers are not tracked. More specific notes about Terrific Airlines are listed below:

• Information about a route includes its unique number, its origin, its destination, and estimated departure and arrival times. To reduce costs, Terrific Airlines only has non-stop flights with a single origin and destination.
• Flights are scheduled for a route on one or more dates with an airplane and a crew assigned to each flight, and the remaining capacity (seats not taken) noted. In a crew assignment, the employee number and the role are noted. It is a government requirement that the number of hours that flight crew (i.e., pilots, co-pilots, engineers) are in flight must be recorded. There is no such requirement for Non-flight crew (e.g., attendants).
• Airplanes have a unique serial number, a model, a capacity, and a next-scheduled-maintenance date.
• The maintenance record of an airplane includes a unique maintenance number, a date, a description, the serial number of the plane, and the employee responsible for the repairs.
• Employees have a unique employee number, a name, a phone, and a job title.
• Customers have a unique customer number, a phone number, and a name (it may or may not be their own).
• A record is maintained of flight reservations including a unique reservation number, a flight number, a customer number, a date, a fare, and the payment method (usually cash but occasionally some else’s cheque or credit card). If the payment is by credit card, a credit card number and an expiration date are part of the reservation record.

What you have to do:

1. Create an entity-relationship diagram showing the data requirements of the system. Your ERD should be able to be implemented in a relational DBMS. You should use the ERD notation we have been using in the lectures, and should include a legend to explain the notation. You should include attributes in the ERD. The use of a drawing tool such as Visio will make this task easier. However, whichever tool you use, you must copy and paste the ERD into a word-processed document. This is because your tutor might not have access to the tools you have used. Please note that hand-drawn ERDs are not acceptable.

2. List and explain any assumptions you have made in creating the data model.

Some important things to note:

1. Part of understanding a system at sufficient enough detail to model well, involves asking appropriate questions. If you are not sure about some detail of the case study, you should ask on the Discussion Forum in LMS.

2. The University email server strips out any Visio (.vsd) files that are sent; even if they are included in a zip archive. So, if you want to send a draft of your design to your lecturer by email, you will need to change the extension to something other than .vsd (.blah works well) or paste the diagram into a word document.

3. Marks will be allocated to each of the following functional areas:

Legend

Entities

Have you included all required entities in the design?

Have you included specialisation hierarchies where appropriate?

Relationships

• Have you designed relationships between the entities that will support the functional requirements?
• Are your relationships correctly annotated?

Will the overall design support the enterprise requirements?

As Assignment 2 will require you to implement the Terrific Airlines database, you will need to take into account the feedback you receive on your conceptual design when commencing your logical and physical designs.