Summary: Designing a Car Rental System

Now that you’ve completed the car rental system case study, let’s take a moment to reflect on and consolidate what we’ve learned. We’ll revisit the key system requirements, identify the core classes along with their responsibilities and relationships, and highlight the major design principles applied. We’ll also examine how objects interact within the system and walk through the overall workflow to understand how the components come together to achieve the desired functionality.

Key requirements

The following are the primary functional and operational requirements for the car rental system:

1. Support two user roles: customer and receptionist.

2. Manage multiple vehicle types: cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles (with subtypes).

3. Track reservations, customer info, rental history, and vehicle logs.

4. Support reservation life cycle: make, update, cancel, pick up, and return.

5. Allow optional services and equipment (e.g., Wi-Fi, child seat).

6. Handle late returns and issue fines automatically.

7. Enable vehicle search by type, model, features, or location.

8. Maintain multi-branch support with branch-specific inventories.

9. Track parking stall availability at each branch.

10. Support secure ...