A Model-Driven Approach for Developing Smart Tourism Web Applications

The Model-driven architecture (MDA) represents a software engineering approach designed to enhance the productivity and quality of software development by using models and transformations. In this paper, we propose a new MDA technic for developing smart tourism web applications, which are applications that provide personalized and interactive services to tourists. This approach consists of three main steps: (1) defining a platform-independent model (PIM) that captures the functional requirements and the domain model of smart tourism, based on the 6 As of tourism; (2) defining a platform-specific model (PSM) that specifies the architectural design of the web application, based on PHP as the programming language and clean architecture as the architectural style; and (3) applying model transformations to generate the source code of the web application from the PSM, using XSLT as the transformation language. We showcase the feasibility and effectiveness of this work by applying it to a case study of a smart tourism web application that allows tourists to explore and book various attractions and activities in a city. We also discuss the benefits and challenges of this approach, as well as some directions for future work.