Conceptual Model for a Generic Resource Booking Management System

Booking, which is the act of reserving resources in advance, is an important component of the operations of organizations of all sizes, from enterprise-level businesses, to service-based small businesses. Several applications, known as Booking Management Systems (BMS), have been developed for managing this booking process. However, a common issue with most of these BMS's is that they are typically developed to serve a particular use case or context, and this usually limits their reusability. To address this issue, we propose a generic, flexible, and extendable BMS model. This model consists of components for managing resource definition, constraints, schedules, booking workflows and their specifications, events etc. We are alsodeveloping a configurable application based on the model. We believe our model and application can be a starting point of development of BMS for users with requirements which are not yet satisfied in existing BMS.