One area where Saibot Airport desires to have business run smoothly is around aircraft services. Every plane requires a number services after arrival and before departure. Examples of these are baggage handling, fueling, power & water supply, cleaning (inside and out), small repairs and catering. Many airlines request these services and a substantial number of companies active on Saibot Airport offer [a subset of] these services.
Saibot has taken the lead in organizing automated, electronic exchange around these services, by specifying a web service interface that any company has to offer if they want to be eligible for performing aircraft services for the airline carriers. When the carriers have scheduled a flight for which they need help with catering or cleaning, they will send requests for proposal to the web services exposed by all companies that can supply aircraft facilities. The service specified by Saibot is an asynchronous service where a carrier can request a quote for some (combination of) services regarding a flight. After whatever internal processing the aircraft service providers have to go through in order to prepare their response to the RFP, the callback with the price quote is made to the airline carrier that initiated the RFP.
In this section we look at an implementation of the AircraftService using BPEL to make the asynchronous callback.We extend this BPEL process to simultaneously call out to multiple AircraftServiceProviders and wait for their proposals in parallel.
Supporting Resources
The starting point sources are in the folder AircraftServices-step1. The final situation for this section is found in folder AircraftServices-step2.
