Client
Over the years, the client has become one of the world's largest mechatronics system manufactures, serving customers all over the world. This self-service kiosk is meant for shopping malls, bus terminals, railway station etc. that offers banking and ticketing services.
Key Business Requirements
The objective is to develop a self-service kiosk that provides a variety of services to the end-user. It is intended for public places and allows end-users to perform business transactions by communicating with remote servers.
The Self-service KIOSK must provide the following services to end-user:
- Establish a new bank account
- Modify the attributes of an existing account
- Enquire about an existing bank account
- General Information enquiry (e.g.: schedule of trains)
- Ticket Purchase and Reservation
It has to satisfy the following product attributes also:
- Flexibility: To enable use for a variety of purposes, including those not envisaged during the initial scope.
- Usability: To enable end users with unspecified age group to operate directly.
- Security: This includes authentication, confidentiality and accountability of end-users in addition to basic network security.
- Maintainability: System shall be maintainable both locally (manual/periodic) and remotely.
- Efficiency: Be responsive to the end-user, even with time consuming operations in the background (network/device IO).
- Reliability: To enable the system to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with the least possible manual intervention.
Challenges
- Understanding the domain – Study of similar systems from other vendors.
- Understanding the requirements – Study of product specifications.
- Choosing the right technology options.
Solution
NeST provided:
- Feasibility Study
- System Architecture
- Design consultancy
- Development and Integration
Technology Used:
- Hardware Platform: Intel Pentium III machine with 512 MB RAM
- Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Embedded
- Communication between the system and the remote servers was established using standard HTTP and RMI.
Layers involved are:
- Business Application layer: This layer was for communicating with the central server.
- Middleware: Provides the terminal services to applications.
- Device Control Library: Responsible for accessing individual devices
Result
- Developed a framework which is designed to support a very generic class of transactions, so as to give the flexibility in introducing new services on the fly.
- Developed a browser-based GUI for the self service kiosk allowing easy maintenance.
- Developed a flexible middleware framework with uniform device control interfaces, aiding easy addition of new devices.
