Schedule Management and Booking System for Care-workers

Client

The client is The AiMeS Centre (Advanced Internet Methods and Emergent Systems), part of the University of Liverpool, and a pioneer in the transfer of e-science to e-business. It focuses on the application of 'grid technology' to real business needs and in the ability to create new business ventures capable of delivering those business solutions.

Problem Background

AiMeS have developed an in-house scheduling algorithm that allocates care-workers to clients who require care at specified locations and at certain times during the day. The exact details of the algorithm itself are confidential. The aim of this project was to develop a prototype system that will enable external bodies to utilize this algorithm by the use of a Web Service.

Project Overview

The project essentially comprises two parts:

A Scheduling Web Service responsible for assigning care-workers to bookings in an efficient manner;

A Web Service Client that has a user friendly GUI, capable of loading information in via csv (Community Service Volunteer) files and both submitting and retrieving data from the Scheduling Web Service.

The use-cases of the system are:

Data input: The user is able to select different cvs files via a GUI that will effectively be data sources from which to pass the necessary information to the Scheduling Web Service;

Send Data: Having Input all the necessary data into the GUI it will then be possible for the user to send the data to the Web Service;

Generate Schedules: Having received the necessary data, the Web Service, integrated with the AiMeS Scheduling Algorithm, provides a resulting schedule. In effect this means the allocation of care-workers to the client's bookings;

Email Notification: Having successfully completed the scheduling process the Web Service sends an email notifying the user that the process is complete;

Get Schedules: Upon completion of the schedule generation user has the ability to get the results via the Web Service.

The project may be regarded as being composed of two distinct software components: the Scheduling Web Service and a Web Service Client that is able to communicate with the Web Service. The code for the scheduling algorithms is written in MS Visual C++ .NET and it is therefore required that the Web Service is written in MS Visual C++. NET in order to facilitate the eventual integration of the Web Service and Scheduling Components.

It is envisaged that the Web Service will eventually be utilized by a large number of clients, thus it is imperative that the Web Service may be consumed by any client and have no platform or operating system dependencies. For example, it should be possible for a client using J2EE on a Linux operating system to consume the Web Service. For testing purposes, the development of a user-friendly GUI interface was required to demonstrate the ability to both send and receive data from the Web Service. The GUI interface should allow the user to specify simple text files to load necessary data in and should be capable of displaying results generated by the web service.

Benefits for the Customer

Cost Reduction - A web server provides optimization of process for external applications which saves time and effort;

Assistance in development of better relations- provides 24/7 ability to access the relevant information;

Maximum flexibility and integration of databases.