MIS501 Principles of Programming Report Sample

MIS501 Principles of Programming Report

Assessment Task

In this assessment, you are required to undertake three tasks. For each task, it is required that you implement a Python program to solve a business problem presented in the business case.

Please refer to the Instructions for details on how to complete this task.

Context

Module 1.1 to Module 4.2 covered many expressive programming syntax and powerful Python language features. Collectively, they can be used to create sophisticated programs to solve real business problems. In each Module, we focused almost exclusively on particular language features or syntax taught in that Module. In this assessment, you have the opportunity to put them all together.

In contrast with the practical exercises in each Module, you are presented with close-to-real-life business problems, and you are asked to develop programs to solve these problems. Sometimes, understanding the business problems and the associated business rules is challenging in their own. The business logics sometimes need to be determined/inferred/interpreted from the business case and business rules, which then need to be implemented using a programming language.

These are the challenges you will inevitably have to address in real life. Therefore, the business case and the business rules in this assessment have been deliberated designed to be convoluted and less straightforward. Understanding the case and the business problem is an integral part of the assessment.

In this assessment, you will demonstrate the following skills and knowledge:

• Grasp business requirements, rules, and logics, and be able to translate them into programming code.

• Implement programs in Python to solve business problems.

• Design a program and illustrate the logic through flowcharts.

Instructions

• Form groups of 2 – 3 students. Please read attached MIS501_Assessment 2 & 3_Group

Formation, Registration and Administration Guidelines document.

• Please read the attached MIS501_Assessment 2_Business Case Study and complete the assessment tasks.

• All implementations must be in Python 3 (that is NOT Python 2). Programs implemented in a different language will be marked 0. Programs implemented in Python 2 will be capped at 50% of the available marks.

• You may only use the language features and syntax taught in Module 1.1 through to Module 4.2. You MUST not use any other language features beyond what was taught by Module 4.2.

(Penalties apply).

• You may implement the programs in any IDE of your choice.

• The program should be provided with adequate and meaning comments.

• Your program should be robust. Check for input validity.

Hint: What would you do if user chose option 3 without entering any user information first?

• Please follow Python Style Guide: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

• You are strongly advised to read the rubric which is an evaluation guide with criteria for grading the assignment. This will give them a clear picture of what a successful final solution looks like.

• Review the Case Study briefing document, located in the assessment area of your learning portal and submit the required files as per the Submission Instructions to complete the assessment.

Solution

Introduction

The Transportation Logistics System includes an investigation into the creation of a simple command line program which is aimed at increasing the efficiency of fleet operations, shipment tracing, and delivering logistics. With the help of Python-related features, the system’s goal is to tackle the challenges of managing many vehicles and shipments, increase operational visibility, and improve control. In this case, the assessment analyzes the automatization and improvement of the logistics processes of the system with the communication with menus and validation processes for the users. The critical analysis demonstrates a rise in the effectiveness of transportation logistics to meet the increased fair and data accuracy while elaborating on the issues of controlling the overall management and operation in real-time.

Thus, integrating fleet management, shipment tracking and delivery logistics into a single interface and making it as user-friendly as possible should minimize operational flaws and prevent human mistakes while providing real-time and historical data to decision-makers. Furthermore, the implementation is done in Python thus making the system very adaptable to change or modification depending on the future advancement and the changes in the business environment (Raschka et al., 2020). Not only does the application of such an approach guarantee the enhancement of efficiency immediately but it also ensures effectiveness in the context of growing rivalry in the future.

Flowchart

The flowchart for the Transportation Logistics System for MBA Assignment Expert effectively outlines the application's operational workflow, highlighting its core components: Therefore the subcategories are; Fleet Management, Shipment Management, and Delivery Management. They show a proper sequence of how one deals with fleet data – adding the new vehicles, modifying the existing ones or erasing them, as well as checking the data for uniqueness of IDs and positive capacities. The shipment management section is laid out with great care to help build, track, and view shipments and incorporates vehicle allocation as well as status display. The delivery management flow assures an accurate document of the delivery statuses with a view of enriching real-time data authenticity. The combination of input and output fields adheres to the practice of the system flowchart specifying user navigation and data quality (Mandruzzato, 2022). The flowchart depicts how the processes in the system are designed to execute the tasks, systematically so that there is optimum efficiency in offering a user-friendly solution to logistics management.

Python Program

Main Menu

Figure 2: Main Menu Code
(Source: Visual Studio Code)

The leading function in the code, the function known as main_menu, creates a fundamental menu that helps the users of the Transportation Logistics System access influential submenus that allow them to operate the main system; these submenus give them access to Fleet Management, Shipment Management, and Delivery Management. It also makes it easier for the users to navigate through this design as this calls for different management menus depending on the inputs given. Thus, the use of well-handled input and a well-developed menu creates the basis for an efficient user interface which is essential in the application of the logistics system. This approach can be substantially rated by the requirements of best practices in software engineering to provide simplicity and functionality of the application accompanied by enhanced effectiveness of the logistics management solution.

Part 1: Fleet Management

Figure 2: Fleet Management
(Source: Visual Studio Code)

The provided Python code for Fleet Management encompasses several significant functions which are mandatory for controlling the vehicles’ fleet, as the logistics system is necessary. Thus, adding, updating, removing and viewing car features perform the transportation logistics domain’s crucial requirements within the code.

1. Add Vehicle: This function is for the generation of a unique ID for every vehicle and also checks that the capacity is a positive integer. It avoids duplication of results and errors, which are essential elements for institutional productivity. Even more, the handling of exceptions for invalid capacities guarantees the reliability of the processed data, thus, boosting the overall credibility of the system (Morais et al. 2022).

2. Update Vehicle Information: The update function is diverse as it enables changes to be made related to vehicle details. It has validity checks to check on the existence of a vehicle and also it checks whether the newly updated capacity is a positive integer or not. This helps to make sure that the information contained in the Fleet database is up to date and proper for use in the management of the fleet and coming up with sound decisions concerning the same.

3. Remove Vehicle: The removal function carries a step that confirms the deletion to ensure that the user did not make a mistake while deleting data hence making it easier for the users to handle any data they want to delete. This works well with the concept developed in the user interface design where a confirmation dialogue is given to avoid accidental actions.

4. View All Vehicles: This function enables the users to have an index of all vehicles hence offering users a chance to have a considerable list of the fleet. These entail the visibility of a fleet's status and this is relevant for the oversight of the fleets as well as operation planning in line with the logistics of the system.

Part 2: Shipment Management

Figure 3: Shipment Management
(Source: Visual Studio Code)

Shipment Management is an important part of the integrated Transportation Logistics System, the provided Python code implements the key operations, including creating, tracking, and viewing shipments. This implementation meets important problems of logistics and improves the performance of the systems.

1. Create a New Shipment: This completes the work of making the Shipment ID unique and checks to verify that the weight is a positive number. In this way, the system does not allow a situation when the client chooses a car that is not available anymore because the car ID is already verified at the first step. These features help in efficient resource utilisation and precise records of the consignment which is vital for logistics.

2. Track a Shipment: The tracking functionality that is integrated is that it is real-time; hence, it would be possible to track the status of the shipment, which is vital for monitoring the logistics processes. This capability means that the users can easily know the status of the shipments whereby which increases the rate at which decisions are made and also increases the level of operation transparency.

3. View All Shipments: Convenience: all the shipments one is involved in today, this week or in the past can be viewed in a tabular form. This feature increases awareness and control over the shipment process and as a result, helps in planning. It is always good to include a command to end a menu just like in the development of this software to celebrate autonomy, the user can be prompted to type ‘exit’ to exit the menu if the user wishes.

Part 3: Delivery Management

The provided Python code for Delivery Management is extremely essential for the exact tracking and logging of deliveries in the logistics management system. This implementation is involved in critical operations of the business and improves the functionality of the system.

1. Record Delivery for a Shipment: The code can handle delivery recording since it checks on the Shipment IDs to avoid repetition of entries. This helps in avoiding mistakes in the delivery records maintaining the integrity of the database. This means that carriers have adopted the use of datetime.now() recording delivery stamps that increase the accuracy of the delivery time. Due to the data about the status of shipment and delivery date, there is a record of completion of the deliveries which gives satisfactory results in logistics.

2. View Delivery Status: The delivery status as a functionality enables users to check the status of delivery to find out if a shipment was delivered, or when it was. This feature is essential for tracking the progress and confirming that all the consignments have been acknowledged, which in turn is a requirement for efficient supply chain management. This error handling for non-existent or undelivered shipments makes sure that users get the proper information they need, which in turn increases operational transparency.

3. System Efficiency and Usability: The distribution of the code improves the flow in which the delivery management takes place, and ensures that users can easily access and manage delivery-related information. The ability to update and retrieve delivery statuses in real-time shows that the system is more effective and efficient, in compliance with principles of logistics and supply chain management. Furthermore, the menu options incorporated explain the environment’s simplicity, enabling easy navigation and interaction with the system.

Evaluation of the Implementation Done Using Python:

The paper proves that the proposed Transportation Logistics System based on Python has a good approach to handling the major difficulties in logistics solutions. However, it is necessary to analyse the code critically in relation to its structure, in order to discuss and explain the possible consequences for performance and the scalability of the system.

Modular Design: Impulse to separate fleet, shipment, and delivery management into the different functions helps to improve code’s readability and maintainability. This to an extent makes it easier to update and expand in the future since the architecture is divided into concern-specific modules. However, with growing system complexity, developers might find it necessary to employ more complex design patterns like Model-View-Controller (MVC) to make the code structure cleaner (Weissenberg, 2019).

Data Persistence: Currently, simple data structures that are created in memory of the computer are lists and dictionaries, and they store information about vehicles, shipment, and deliveries. However, this solution is fine when the program is a prototype or used at a small scale but it does not show consistency throughout different instances of the program execution. For a production environment a database system (for example SQLite for local storage or PostgreSQL for more heavy usage of system) should be integrated to maintain data integrity and to add more features as well as more effective queries and reports.

Error Handling: The code is completed with the simplest error control included check for any input errors, for example, non-positive value and ID duplicates. However, a more complex strategy of error handling, perhaps with the help of custom classes derived from the Exception class (e.g., next((v for v in vehicles if v['id'] == vehicle_id), None)), can generate more useful error messages and make work with the code less troublesome (Tesei et al., 2021).

Scalability Considerations: At the same time, as more fleets become incorporated into the system and more complex logistics operations are managed, these bottlenecks may arise. At the present time the basic forms of searching for vehicles and shipments are also linear and might be ineffective with large data sets. Additional solutions to the problem of data organization might be useful for retaining high efficiency when working at scale, such as the use of different types of data structures and indexing.

Conclusion

The conclusion that can be derived from the study and the case analysis is that appropriate management systems must be adopted and implemented to cause a positive change in the outlook of the users and the overall management of the process. In the Fleet, Shipment, and Delivery Management lessons, the content presented reveals general concepts of the option to manage a company’s vehicles and shipments to avoid mistakes and improve organizational performance. The Code implementations represent good views for user interface, valid data input and dynamic updates that are crucial in managing stocks and helping clients. Through tracking and managing features incorporated into the systems, they enhance the communication and reporting on specific assignments about logistics. Besides that, the work also provides insights into technology relations with the operation and highlights the design aspect of solutions that are sustainable. In conclusion, the research findings as well as the case study provide support for the notion of the relevance of well-designed or implemented management systems for the achievement of operational effectiveness as well as for the improvement of customers’ satisfaction across many disciplines.

References

Mandruzzato, L., 2022. Ensuring High Data Quality Standards: A Framework for Single and Cross-Enterprise Platforms.
Morais, C., Estrada-Lugo, H.D., Tolo, S., Jacques, T., Moura, R., Beer, M. and Patelli, E., 2022. Robust data-driven human reliability analysis using credal networks. Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 218, p.107990.

Raschka, S., Patterson, J. and Nolet, C., 2020. Machine learning in python: Main developments and technology trends in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Information, 11(4), p.193.

Tesei, A., Lattuca, D., Tardo, A., Di Mauro, L., Pagano, P., Luise, M., Bartolomeu, P.C. and Ferreira, J., 2021. Securing seaport logistic vehicles using a distributed ledger-based credential management system. IEEE Open Journal of Vehicular Technology, 2, pp.162-179.
Weissenberg, C., 2019. Model-View Design Patterns. Tagungsband, p.102.