1 A Confederation of Patterns for Resource Management Rosana T. Vaccare Braga ICMC-Universidade de S o Paulo/ Universidade de Franca C. P. 668, 13560-970 - S o Carlos – SP - Brazil Phone Number: 55 16 273-9679 / 273-9696 e-mail: rtvb@icmc.sc.usp.br Fern S. R. Germano ICMC-Universidade de S o Paulo E-mail: fernao@icmc.sc.usp.br Paulo Cesar Masiero 1 ICMC-Universidade de S o Paulo E-mail: masiero@icmc.sc.usp.br Abstract A confederation of patterns that covers a great number of applications in business systems is proposed. Resource Management is the term used to d efine these a pplications. It i ncludes patterns for Resource Location, Resource Trading and Resource Maintenance. They are applied to examples as medical attendance, video rental, real estate rental, library service, show box office, fertilizer retail store and car repair shop. The proposal is based on professional practice, and results from the combination of recurring patterns, already covered in other PLoPs. The practice used mostly procedural languages, but through object oriented reverse engineering of real systems it was possible to explicit the proposed object oriented patterns. 1 - Introduction We propose a c onfederation of patterns for designing systems for r esource management. This confederation results from more than ten years of practice of systems development for medium and small business. Most of this practice has been done using procedural languages, but after getting acquainted with the concept of software patterns it was possible to recognize patterns as the basis of the reuse that has been done in the construction of more than twenty systems. They cover electric and mechanical car repair shops, television and video cassette repair shops, fertilizer retail stores, motorcycle dealers, electric appliance repair shops, perfume retail stores, video-rental stores, odontological attendance, publicity agencies, etc. In all these systems, some objects can be easily identified, as well as the methods they involve, their relationships and attributes. For example, customer or party is a common object, with its usual attributes like code, name, address, etc. Another object that appears repeatedly is resource, with transactions to relate it to the parties. If we try to use recurring patterns to each of these situations, we can observe that many patterns are similarly applied. The confederation of patterns here proposed, called Resource Management, includes three patterns that are formed by recurring patterns originally proposed by Coad [Coad 92], Fowler [Fowler 97] and Boyd [Boyd 98]. Their combination for the applications mentioned earlier have common points that are covered in the proposed set of patterns. The similarities among these systems make it worth to think about how to establish a pattern that could come to the mind of designers when they are developing a system in the domain. Resource Management is broken down to Resource Location Pattern, Resource Trading Pattern and Resource Maintenance Pattern. These, however, are not mutually exclusive. Resource Location focus mainly on the satisfaction of a certain temporary need of a good, like the use of a physician time for an attendance or the use of a videotape for seeing a motion picture. Resource Trading focus on the transference of property of a 1 Financial support from CNPq and FAPESP