You have been asked to develop a data model for the Drip

Question:

Background:

Here is the question
You have been asked to develop a data model for the Drip Drip Water Company (DDWC). DDWC is the sole supplier of water to the citizens and businesses of the town of Drip Drip.
Each of DDWC’s customers is classified as being either residential or non-residential. Each customer has at least one water meter that measures the water consumed by the customer at a particular address. Water meters must be replaced when they have been in use for 5 years.
All customers are billed monthly. Meter readers, who are employed by DDWC, are paid per meter they read. They are each allocated up to 1000 meters to read each month.
Once the reader has read the meter, the reading is recorded and the bill for that customer is calculated based on the consumption since the last reading. For example, if the last meter reading was 123580 kilolitres (kl) and the next reading was 123683kl, the consumption for that period would be 103kl.
Residential customers’ bills are calculated as follows: for each residence, the customer is billed a flat rate of $25 supply charge. They are then billed a further 24c for each kl consumed since the last reading. There are no GST or other taxes imposed.
Non-residential customers’ bills are calculated as follows: there is no supply charge. They are charged only for the consumption since the last reading. They are charged 24c for the first 100 kl, 30c for the second 100 kl and 50c for each kl in excess of 200kl.
All customers are given 30 days from the billing date to pay their account. They can pay by cash, paypal, or EFT. Customers who do not pay within the 30 days will have an accounting charge of $5 added to the bill. After 45 days a further $10 accounting charge is added. At 60 days, the customer’s water supply is cut off. Once a customer has had their supply cut off, the person or business responsible for the bill will not be able to create a new account at a different address until their arrears have been cleared.
Each customer has the right to request a report that details the historical consumption of water at the address of their account, whether they were the customer at the time or not.
What you have to do:
1. Create an entity-relationship diagram showing the data requirements of the system. Your ERD should be able to be implemented in a relational DBMS. You should use the ERD notation we have been using in the lectures, and should include a legend to explain the notation. You should include attributes in the ERD. The use of a drawing tool such as Visio will make this task easier. However, whichever tool you use, you must copy and paste the ERD into a word-processed document. This is because your tutor might not have access to the tools you have used. Please note that hand-drawn ERDs are not acceptable.
2. List and explain any assumptions you have made in creating the data model.
Some important things to note:
1. Part of understanding a system at sufficient enough detail to model well, involves asking appropriate questions. If you are not sure about some detail of the case study, you should ask on the Discussion Forum in LMS.
2. The University email server strips out any Visio (.vsd) files that are sent; even if they are included in a zip archive. So, if you want to send a draft of your design to your lecturer by email, you will need to change the extension to something other than .vsd (.blah works well) or paste the diagram into a word document.
3. Marks will be allocated to each of the following functional areas:
• Legend
• Entities
• Have you included all required entities in the design?
• Have you included specialisation hierarchies where appropriate?
• Relationships
• Have you designed relationships between the entities that will support the functional requirements?
• Are your relationships correctly annotated?
• Will the overall design support the enterprise requirements?
As Assignment 2 will require you to implement the DDWC database, you will need to take into account the feedback you receive on your conceptual design when commencing your logical and physical designs.