The COVID-19 outbreak has highlighted the importance of governments quickly and efficiently vaccinating a population. A competent software system helps coordinate and monitor a vaccine programme. This project aims to develop a software system that allows staff to support the supply, distribution, and inoculation of vaccines to a population in real time by adding and viewing data from a database, and tracking vaccinations, deliveries, and any issues that may need addressing. The system will also automate much of the process, such as stock management and appointment booking, and contain the ability to simulate a vaccination rollout with large populations at greater than real time speeds to test the system’s automation algorithms.
This report researches which software engineering techniques and methodologies are best suited to this project, as well as existing solutions and algorithms, and how they could be modified to meet the project’s aims. The project’s objectives are stated as a set of requirements, and the design, implementation, and testing of the software is documented. This includes database, class, and activity diagrams, design mock- ups, detailed explanations and pseudocode of any algorithms used, unit, system and acceptance testing, and the results and analysis of several scenarios to test the quality of automation. The system produced was of high quality and performed well in different scenarios, however additional work could be done to further improve the automation and consider more details and edge cases involved in vaccine distribution.
As the system requires an SQL database several steps are required before launching the application. First an SQL server must be setup. This can be achieved by installing MySQL Community Edition (https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/) and creating a new connection by clicking the + icon with the name “vaccine_system”, hostname “127.0.0.1” and port “3306” to ensure compatibility with the system. Next create the database in MySQL by running SQL/create_database_table.sql and optionally populate the database by running one of the scenario scripts. To run a script you click the lightning symbol. When running the script to create a database you may first need to run the 2nd line (CREATE DATABASE vaccine_system), refresh the schema panel, select the vaccine_system database and then run the remaining lines. To run lines individually, highlight the lines you wish to execute and then press the lightning symbol. Finally, run the system by opening out/artifcats/vaccine_jar2/vaccine.jar. Please note you may need to re-adjust the window size when you launch the program as some OSs will not display any content until then. Also, after logging in with your database credentials the system may take a while to load.
If you want to compile the code yourself I recommend doing it in and IDE such as IntelliJ (https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/?fromIDE=#section=mac) and adding a MySQLConnector by adding the mysql:mysql-connector-java in maven or adding it as a java library.
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