Development of a Layered Architecture for a Single-Farm Fish Farming Management System Using Prototype Method

Abstract

Small-scale fish-farming businesses often experience challenges in managing the fragmented operational data, which includes cultivation activities, inventory, transactions and reporting processes. Lack of an integrated information management structure restricts the traceability of data and reduces the efficiency of operations. Unlike prior digital aquaculture systems, which mainly target environmental monitoring, this study designs a layered architecture for the web-based single-farm fish farming management system using the prototype method, with novelty in the architecture-level integration of five system layers with four business domains rather than in either method individually. The research methodology consists of requirement analysis, software requirements specification development, layered architecture design, prototype development, system implementation, and functionality verification. The proposed architecture separates system components into five logical layers: presentation, application, data access, data and cache layers and decomposes business functions into production, inventory, financial and reporting domains. The developed system comprises eight functional modules that enable the fish farming management processes from end to end. The functional verification was done by black-box testing with nine test scenarios, which had a 100% success rate. The results indicate that the proposed layered architecture provides a structured basis for integrating cultivation and business processes in a single-farm fish farming environment; maintainability and scalability follow from the design but were not empirically measured. Future development may extend the architecture with multi-farm management, Internet of Things integration and quantitative evaluation of software quality attributes.