generic e-Business systems (Li et al., 2008). This platform is being
developed to have three basic modeling views, i.e., business view,
process view, and service view. The platform is a collaborative
development environment for engineers and consultants from IT
vendors or businesses such as business consultants, technical con-
sultants and solution designers. The platform allows them to use
customized views to model their requirements according to their
expertise and languages. The platform supports rapid service-ori-
ented e-business analysis, planning, process reengineering and
application integration. Various stakeholders can use special views
designated for their roles to collaborate on a service-oriented e-
business system over geographically distributed sites. In another
work, we designed a service-oriented digital city framework and
customized the platform for features and requirements of digital
cities (Zhu, Li, Shi, Xu, & Shen, 2009). The initiative for digital city
framework is from a project funded by municipal government. The
project had been accomplished and the research on its develop-
ment platform was hard to get down into the implementation.
Since 2006, authors took part in another project for travel por-
tal. With fast-emerging tourism resources, infrastructure and ser-
vices, tourism is becoming a critical economic activity for China.
During the past few years China has put many measures in place
to develop travel resources and marketplaces. Tourism has contrib-
uted to a large amount of income to the ten cities such as Zhou-
shan, Mianyang, Huangshan, Hangzhou, Beijing, Suzhou, Guilin,
and Kunming. Encouraged by past successes, the China central gov-
ernment, provincial governments and municipal governments
have initiated many programs to develop new tourism models
and infrastructure that meet the needs of modern tourism industry
(China Industry Research, 2009).
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is becoming a leading para-
digm for system engineering and applications integration (W3C,
2010). There are thousands of Web-based travel sites and online
ticketing systems. Two of the most popular systems in China are
ctrip.com (Xiecheng Computer Technology Ltd. Corporation,
2010) and tickets.com (Shanghai Zhangshang Information Service
Consulting Ltd. Corporation, 2009). However, most of these sys-
tems only cater for ticketing agents and the ticketing systems,
and they do not provide the services such as tourist spots tickets,
tour guides and other services beyond travel and hotel reservation.
In addition, there is no trustable cooperative platform for service
providers. Thus, development of an SOA based portal was required
to streamline travel-related services from various modeling and
design points of view. Further, intelligent route planning services
(Niaraki & Kim, 2009) and service discovery and management ser-
vices (Leea & Park, 2009) should be employed to make the Web
systems to provide better user experiences. We designed a collab-
orative travel service portal with multi-level authentication for the
project (Li, Xie, Zhu, Dong, & Chao, 2009). The work presented in
this paper is a part of these initiatives.
Service-oriented software engineering methods, development
tools, delivery platforms and performance monitoring tools are re-
quired to model, design and develop complex Web services applica-
tions. A majority of software engineering methods applied to SOA
applications are based on object oriented paradigm. It is necessary
to develop tools and techniques in order to address this issue in SOA
applications. For example, Yu-Liang Chia and Hsun-Ming Lee pro-
posed a formal modeling platform for composing Web services
(Chia & Lee, 2008). The mentioned SOEP is suitable for service-ori-
ented system but not for object-oriented system design. Service-
oriented engineering platforms overlook programming issues and
support business and process design to incorporate SOA features
of loose coupling, semantic description discovery and cross-plat-
form composition. The proposed platform describes both business
and design concepts and elements in a well-defined structured
and processable format. To implement a service-oriented system
the developers need to capture business requirements and incorpo-
rate them into IT systems. The proposed platform has been de-
signed on WSDL (Farrell & Lausen, 2009), BPMN (OMG, 2009) and
WS-BPEL (OASIS, 2007). As a result, the proposed platform can
accurately represent business logics, the context and function of
the services, service operations at abstract level, interface design
and expressions of service design.
3. Service-oriented travel portal
3.1. Motivation
A service-oriented travel portal is being developed by authors
for Shanghai World-Expo and Yangtze River Delta in China. A travel
alliance has been set up to share resources and infrastructure
across the delta to contribute towards the success of the portal.
In the portal the tourism resources, services and information are
a kind of public goods and distributed in different cities and do-
mains that needs to be composed and delivered to travelers
according to their requirements. The portal combines resources
and services of bus companies, hotels, rail companies and sightsee-
ing vendors to provide travel packages to clients. The proposed
portal could be viewed as an online ticketing window as compared
to their current offline ticketing offices.
With tourists’ demand for personalized and diversified services,
travel service providers need to build a powerful platform for infor-
mation services and information interexchange to provide inte-
grated one-stop tourism products. There has been some progress
on cooperative travel portal for distributed resources and service
sharing, for example, the ticketing system of Shanghai tourism
hub is now not only a travel hub of Shanghai’s ticketing, but also
as a tourism hub in the Yangtze River Delta and provides ticketing
services to other parts of the Delta. However, with many tourism
hubs for Yangtze River Delta, there are many heterogeneous prob-
lems with geographic distribution, service systems, data protocols
and standards.
3.2. Technical architecture of the portal
The proposed travel portal is to apply service-oriented architec-
ture and Web services to the planning, design, implementation and
integration of a travel portal, and to make the portal flexible and
responsive to meet dynamic service composition and evolvements.
Service-oriented architecture aims to increase the travel portal’s
manageability through the design of large granular services to be
constructed from smaller ones, to split up a complex problem into
smaller problems to be solved independently, and to improve
openness and flexibility. With the SOA paradigm, it is easy to add
new services, update, replace or remove existing services without
affecting the others.
As can be seen from Fig. 1, further, the portal is designed to be a
Internet-based distribution center and provided services for re-
source sharing, route scheduling and service management across
industries, businesses and locations. From the geographic side,
the portal is a joint travel e-marketplace for providers and tourists
across counties, provinces and cities. This unified e-marketplace is
helpful to reduce barriers between economic entities and provide a
one-stop travel service for tourists.
The developed portal provides a number of options for the con-
sumers to choose for their desired trips. The services the portal
provides include flights, hotels, train/ship/coach ticket booking. It
also offers travel packages and some highly recommended pack-
ages for the consumers. The consumers are allowed to choose
and compose their own packages in the system. So, the system
needs to be able to optimize their selections in order to propose
1214 Y. Li et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 1213–1222