Full Project – Computerized bus reservation system – case study of City Bus

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Transportation could simply be defined as the movement of people and goods from one location to another. Throughout history, the economic wealth and military power of people or nation have been closely tied to efficient methods of transportation. Transportation provides access to natural resources and promotes trade, allowing a nation to accumulate wealth and power. Transportation system and the routes they use have greatly influenced both how and where people live. Reliable transportation allows a population to expand throughout a country’s territory and to live comfortably in remote areas far from factories and farms.

Transportation is vital to a nation’s economy so reducing the cost of transporting natural resources to production sites and moving finished goods to the market is one of the key factors in economic competition. Transportation is usually classified by the medium in which the movement occurs, such as land, air, water or pipeline. Within each of the three media, many different methods are used to move people and goods from place to place.

According to Pedone (2001), the widespread use of Internet has led to the emergence of a variety of electronic services, e-services. Electronic ticket, or e-ticket, is an example of such a class of eservices. Bus Ticket Reservation System enables the bus company’s customer to buy bus ticket online-ticket is the easiest and quickest way to take bus. The online system is a new system because it’s just getting roots in bus company globally and even in Nigeria. Currently, staff at the bus ticket counter is using an internal system to sell ticket at the counter. Customer is unable to buy bus ticket online at this moment and has to go to the counter to buy bus ticket. Sometimes, customer needs to queue up a long queue to buy bus ticket and ask for information. Besides that, customer also not allows buying bus ticket through telephone and Transnational’s telephone line is always busy. This brings a lot of inconvenience to the customers.

Currently, with the effective and efficient mode of transportation, one could travel thousands of miles with hours and days and communicate across the globe within split of seconds. Public in many countries, especially in the third world, prefer to use buses and train services to travel from one location to another. An automated bus reservation system is the ticketing system which uses self-service technology as a base of application helping the user to book a ticket by themselves (Silva, 2013).

Online Bus Ticket Reservation System enables the customer to buy bus ticket, make payment, cancel reservation and ask for information online easily. Furthermore, staff can sell bus ticket using the Bus Ticket Reservation System after check bus ticket availability for the customer and print the bus ticket to the customer that queue up in the counter.

1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

The administration of Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan gave the transportation system in Delta State a great attention. Part of this transformation agenda has made Delta City Bus, with their white and blue colour, a common feature in towns and villages of the state and many cities in Nigeria. The intervention in transportation became prominent in 2008 with the establishment of the Delta State urban mass transit scheme and the launching of 168 brand new Toyota Corolla cars by Governor Uduaghan.

In 2009 and 2010, the state government further increased the fleet with the purchase and commissioning of 100 and 200 brand new Hiace buses. By the acquisition of 800 vehicles, comprising Hiace buses, Toyota taxi cars and Marcopolo buses, the Governor has stemmed the hitherto crisis that greeted the transport sector during the deregulation of the petroleum downstream sector early 2012. In summary, 800 vehicles comprising Toyota taxi cabs, 500 Hiace buses, 60 Marcopolo buses, 10 Tata buses and 130 boats constituted the Delta State Mass transit. This has immensely improved the transport sector and reduced the stress associated with daily movement of Deltans.

On February 1, 1965, SAS became the first airline to use an electronic booking system SASCO (short for SAS Computer System) that covered all of Europe, beginning a journey that would lead to undreamed-of technological innovations.

When it launch was launched, SASCO was the largest computer system in Northern Europe. Experts from eight different countries helped create the system, which was the result of close collaboration between SAS and IBM. The system monitored air travel and had to be in operation 24 hours a day. There was a reserve facility on standby as a backup solution, along with 300 large car batteries and six diesel generators in case of a power outage.

The system had enormous capacity and stored data on an IBM 1301 disk storage unit that could hold up to 112 million characters. SASCO had a large data center at Copenhagen Airport, with a direct connection to 300 computers in 21 cities across 13 countries. The system was also linked to 4,000 teleprinters all over the world. You called up the data center and when contact was established, you could send your message.

At the end of the 1970s, almost 500,000 transactions passed through the computer system in Copenhagen. This figure grew rapidly, reaching 1 million in 1981. By the mid-1980s, it had doubled again to 2 million.

Another landmark year was 1987, when SAS, Lufthansa, Air France and Iberia launched Amadeus, a distribution system for information and reservations between passengers and travel agents. Amadeus has since become one of the industry standards. The origin of e-payment is related to the beginning of the web. Alongside the web development, pioneer online payment services started to operate in the first half of the 90s. In 1983, a research paper by David Chaum introduced the idea of digital cash. In 1990, he founded Digi Cash, an electronic cash company, in Amsterdam to commercialize the ideas in his research In 1994 Stanford Federal Credit Union was established – the first financial institution which offered online internet banking services to all of its members. but, first online payment systems weren’t user-friendly at all and required specific learning of encryption or data transfer protocol.

1.2 STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

The system that is being used by the staff at the counter currently is an internal system and just used to sell the bus ticket at the counter. Customer has to go to the counter to buy bus ticket or ask for bus schedule. Furthermore, customers need to pay cash when they buy the bus ticket and sometimes needs to queue up long time to get the bus ticket. Besides that, most staff have hidden operations of special customer ticket issuance which cannot be tracked by the management team of the companies. The solution to this problem is to create an online portal for buying bus ticket system.

Customer can buy the bus ticket over the Internet, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and the bus ticket can’t be lost, stolen or left behind.

1.3 AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

In this study, the aim is to design an automated system of bus ticketing (reservation) in transportation companies. The objectives of the online system include:

To provide an automated bus ticket buying functions. Customer can buy bus ticket through the online system and no need to queue up to buy bus ticket at the counter.
To enable customer to check the availability of the bus ticket online.
To ease the bus ticket payment by online.
To reduce the number of staff at the point of sale by a way of cost minimization.

1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

This system will be very important to transportation companies, its customers and the general public. It is important to customer because customer can check availability of the bus ticket, buy bus ticket, cancel bus ticket and pay the bus ticket online. The automated bus reservation system is different from the traditional paper ticket because e-ticket is safer, faster, reliable and cheaper. Besides that, this concept can be used by others bus company so that their customers will be satisfied. The profit for the bus company will be increased because the online system will attract more customers and no need to hire many staffs at the counter to sell bus ticket because ticket can be sold efficiency online.

1.5 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The development of the system covers only the use of HTML, CSS and XAMPP database server in the transportation operation of the Delta State City Transport Service.

1.6 LIMITATION OF THE STUDY

During the development of the research study, they following limitations were encountered;

Limited research material available at the school library and on the internet.
High cost of setting up the system as it requires a high programming language.
Combining school work and carrying out the research.

1.7 DEFINITION OF TERMS

Bus Number– This uniquely identifies a Bus.
Administrator– Refers to an authorized official of the airline who has the authority to change and update the databases.
Reservation– The written record or promise of an arrangement by which accommodations are secured in advance.
System– This is any collection of component elements that work together to perform a task.
Module – One of a set of separate parts which, when combined, form a complete whole.
Automation – Automation describes a wide range of technologies which reduce human intervention in processes.

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