CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction

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. Pipelines are used
mainly for transportation of liquids or gases over long distances.
The Online Bus Ticket Reservation System is a web-based application that allows
visitors check bus ticket availability, buy bus ticket and pay the bus ticket online. This system is
established for all the home/office users after gaining access from the administrator. Online Bus
Reservation System provides bus transportation system, a facility to reserved seats, cancellation
of seats and different types of enquiry which need an instant and quick reservation. This system
can be used by the users in performing online reservation via internet for their all business
purposes. Users can use this program directly on their websites and no need to install it.
The use of bus traveling is a large growing business in Ethiopia and other countries;
hence bus reservation system deals with maintenance of records of each passenger who had
reserved a seat for a journey. It also includes maintenance of information like schedule and
details of each bus. Also, we get to know that there are many operations, which they have to do
manually. It takes a lot of time and causes many errors. Due to this, sometimes a lot of problems
occur and they were facing many disputes with customers. To solve the above problem, and
further maintaining records of items, seat availability for customers, price of per seat, bill
generation and other things, we are offering this proposal of reservation system. The reservation
system has three modules (functions). First module helps the customer to enquire the availability
of seats in a particular bus at particular date, the second module helps him to reserve a ticket and
with the third module he can cancel a reserved ticket.
However, since the current reservation system is still conducted manually and separately
at each branch, contact must be made by each branch’s front-officer to the head office for each
customer’s enquiry in order to get the latest update on schedule, seat availability and other
reservation-related information; as well as to avoid duplicate bookings or over-capacity. There is
also a physical limit to the reservation availability the center only operates during certain hours
and reservations can only be made on-the-spot. These limitations are not the only issues the
station is currently facing (This is a common challenge for even other transportation companies).
Other factors that create problems include human errors (e.g. miscalculations in ticket price,
mistakes in noting passenger data, etc.), the fluctuation of passengers during certain periods of
time that causes a bottleneck in the check-in process because of the inability of the front officer
to multitask and the lack of overview or report of the on-going business; making it difficult for
the company to judge past/current performance or plan future improvements. Looking at these
problems and limitations, it is clear that both the company and the customers require an
integrated reservation system that is more efficient in information update and reservation
handling and also easy to use. Electronic tickets, or e-tickets, give evidence that their holders
have permission to enter a place of entertainment, use a means of transportation, or have access
to some internet services. Bus Ticket Reservation System enables the customer to buy bus ticket,
make payment, and ask for information online easily. Furthermore, staff can sell bus ticket using
Bus Ticket Reservation System after check bus ticket availability for the customer. The method
to solve this problem is to create an online 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. In addition, the online system lets the customers check the availability of the bus
ticket before they buy bus ticket. Furthermore, customers no need to pay cash to buy bus ticket
because they can pay the bus ticket by using deposit slip number order by bank.

1.2 Background

1.3 Statement of the problem

The system that the organization currently using is manual system. It make the users, whether the
passengers or the officers, bored in proceeding. It press the officers to prepare printed tickets and
must make a contact with the passengers. Obviously, this time we are living in is the time that
world declared to be far apart from each other. This is because of contagious called COVID 19.
So anyone in the system is threated to be affected by the contagious. Once a single person is
affected by COVID 19 his/her family, friends and community is in risk. The system, beyond
wasting the time, it wastes lives. In addition to this current problem of the world the center we
are helping is facing the following problems.

 Users must arrive to the ticket center to buy a ticket. But he/she would said “It’s
finished!” The passenger helped to check an availability of a ticket.
 Officers work for a limited time. This makes the user to be lose the chance to buy a ticket
anytime he/she want to do.
 A ticket is must be the authorized thicket prepared by an authorized organization.
Sometimes they would finish a module of ticket owned from the organization sent from
Addis Ababa.
 Temporarily used tickets costs so much. We are going to save much cost.
  Users has no chance to comment and ask questions the time they want. We would make a
simple and short way to comment and to ask loyally and openly.
1.4 Objectives

1. General objective
The main objective of this project is to build or develop and implement efficient and effective
Online Bus Ticketing System for Bule Hora District.

2. Specific objectives
The aims of this system are:
 To provide a web-based buying bus ticket functions. Customer can buy bus
ticket through the online system and no need to queue up to buy bus ticket
in the counter.
 To provide anytime anyplace service for the customer. Customer can buy
bus ticket 24 hours a day, 7 days a week over the Internet.
 To enable customer to check the availability of the bus ticket online.
Customer can check the time departure and arrival for every bus through
the system.
 To ease the bus ticket payment by online.
 To minimize the number of staff.

1.5 Significance of the project

The system would be proposed by two languages, English and Afaan Oromoo. In addition to using
two different languages to interact with it, the system would have the following significant:
 It help the users to interact with the beautiful interface.
 The administrator can post and update the information accurately.
 The administrator able to control the system.
 The passenger can get the bonus kilometers.
 The logged in passengers can access the entertainment posts.
 Reduce the wastage of money and time for the service by perform many tasks online in
short period of time.
 Reduce unnecessary resource wastage.
  Reduce employee overload work.
 Provide easy and fast information access method.
 Minimize the chance of losing data
 The system is secured.

1.6 Scope

This project is limited only for Bule Hora University students. Currently the university performs
clearance system manually or paper based processing system. Generally the scope of this project
includes:-
 Our system used for passengers use only the Bule Hora to Addis Ababa route.
 The System contains all the recorded information that can be handled by the
staff.
 Registration for a membership.
 Internet based.
 Administrator control the system.
The proposed system is accessed by only two languages, it doesn’t support Amharic, well used
language.

1.7 Motivation (0)

1.8 Limitation and delimitation (if any)

Proposing any IT based system for such like organization is so full of challenges. A people is one
of the main components of a system. Complexity of a system is so dependent on the numbers of
peoples in the system electronic devices in the system. Here is the reason for our limitations to
build a system. We are faced some difficult situations from peoples going to use the new system
prepared by our team.

 We are faced with international websites developed by experienced developers. We have

to fulfill the requirements of online bus seat reservation websites.
 The system must be effective, significant and also attractive. To do this the time to think
about the features of our system is consumer. But we are students of special batch taking
one year and a semester courses in a year only. The time is too short think, we only do.
  When we have seated down to write the codes our knowledge of back end programming
language is limited. This is because of the time we are started learning the course called
“Advanced Web Development and Management (INSC2012)” is the same time we are
suggested to do this project by our department. So building a new like this system was
hard for us.
 Beyond this, getting information of the current system was not simple. The staff we
talked with is not open to give the information for us. They think some of the information
as confidential.
 We have faced a challenge to make payment part of our project. It needs having an API
key from API key provider website. An API key is an individual code given to a
localhosts. It works with payment checker, locally with a computers operating systems.

1.9 Document organization

 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE VIEW

The internet has become an integral part of a modern society helping revolutionize how business
are conducted and our personal lives as well in addition to creating more jobs and transfer of
technology by teaching new skills. This chapter defines facts and finding on Online Automated
reservation system for transportation.
IT-based (Online) bus ticketing and payment system

IT-based (Online) bus ticketing and payment system is synonymous to an online reservation
system or computer reservations system (CRS) or central reservation system, Wikipedia, 2011.
IT-based bus ticketing and payment system is a computerized system used to store and retrieve
information and conduct transactions related to bus travel. This idea of IT-based bus ticketing
and payment system was originally designed and operated by airlines operators before its use
was later extended to road transport travel agencies. Major CRS operations that book and sell
tickets for multiple airlines are known as global distribution systems (GDS). Airlines have
divested most of their direct holdings to dedicated GDS companies, who make their systems
accessible to consumers through Internet gateways. Modern GDSs typically allow users to book
hotel rooms and rent cars as well as airline tickets. They also provide access to railway
reservations in some markets although these are not always integrated with the main system.
Based on Pedone (2001), 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. E-tickets give evidence to their holders to have permission to enter a place of
entertainment, use a means of transportation, or have access to some Internet services. Users can
get the e-tickets by purchasing them from a web server, or simply receiving from a vendor, or
from another user who previously acquired them. E-tickets can be stored in desktop computers or
personal digital assistants for future use.

Advantages of IT-based bus ticketing and payment

Quicker as the individual does not need to contact the airline, the bus company, and the hotel all
separately
• Convenient as it can be done by anyone and anywhere with an internet
connection
• Customers can compare bus, flight, hotel, and rental car rates
• Saves the time and trouble to find a suitable travel agent
• Cheaper fares/flying rates as some websites give lower rates for certain
packages. Cheaper rates are also used to attract potential customers.
Modern service enterprises are challenged by a strong competition and dynamically changing
business environments. Consequently, the precision of the business requirements identification
and rigorous planning regarding investments to information technologies play a key role in the
implementation of new capabilities. As the business today is more and more powered by
information that is unstructured, social and distributed via various channels, the multi-channel
interaction is a reality. It means each customer generates more and more data. On the other hand,
a customer is often flooded with a huge amount, mostly not relevant, advertising information.
Companies are challenged to collect the data from the customer interaction, analyze it and
prepare an intelligent recommendation for an agent or to feed relevant offers to the customer.
Modern understanding of the unstructured information requires a fundamentally new approach
using the technology to deliver insights, ideas, and an intuition into the rapidly growing and
diverse data that customers deal with every day. A hot topic is to decrease the costs and increase
the customer satisfaction. One of the sensitive areas is customers’ interaction via company’s
contact web forms. This interaction consists mostly of questions or complaints. Accordingly, we
describe in our paper a new approach for generating these contact forms using the textual
analytics, processing of frequently asked questions and a rule-based system. We also present
particular use-cases to illustrate how this approach works in practice.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12927-014-0006-4.pdf
 CHAPTER 3: DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY

2.1 Data collection methods

This involves gathering facts about the existing system. The purpose of this analysis is to identify
the inefficiencies associated with the existing system and the requirement analysis for the
proposed system, Online Bus Ticketing System. There are many fact-gathering techniques that
can use in gathering the information such as interview, observation, questionnaires and other
method.
Observation method: This method is a technique used to obtain an overall virtual impact of a
system environment. This takes into the study of details relating to customers and the traditional
reservation system, the speed of operations, number of staff, bottlenecks and delays, etc. we took
time to examine the way factors that are detrimental to customer satisfaction. This method
helped us to know the problem encountered by the traditional system that will be eliminated by
the computerized system.
Questionnaire method: This method was used to obtain information from external party about
the system. Concise and unambiguous questions made up the questionnaire.
Interviews: This method was engaged so as to get detailed understanding of the system and
clearer insight to the system and policies were also gathered. Summarily, this method gave up
some integral dynamics and uses of the system.

2.2 System analysis (proposed and existing)

Analysis phase is the step that is concern with first studying the existing system, then using the
information gathered to define the requirements for a new system. Analysis follows the problem
recognition and feasibility phases and must be completed before the design phase can begin.
Description of Proposed System
The system is very simple to design and to implement. The system requires very low system
resources and the system will work in almost all configurations. It has got the following features:
• It will ensure data accuracy.
• Records will be efficiently maintained by DBMS.
• Availability of seats can be enquired easily.
• Passengers can also cancel their tickets easily.
• Minimum time needed for the various processing.
 • It will provide better Service.
• It supports all types of screen resolution: Mobile, Tablets and Desktops. It looks
beautiful whatever the user’s device is.

Analysis of existing system

To avoid queues and hassles associated with last minute immediate travel bookings at terminals,
some passengers look forward to make reservations before the actual time of travel. With the
reservation method, the customer must first confirm the financial implications, if there are
available seats; the passenger must now choose a seat. All of this requires the staff manually
opening and checking documents and books each time to get the required indication while the
customer and the other possibly in a queue exercise the virtue of patience same applies to those
calling the terminus. Finally the passengers’ data is required in order to issue the ticket and
prepare manifest.
Basic data contained in the ticket are: Full name, Address, Seat number, phone number or e-
mail. A ticketing officer handling more than one route repeats this process for every route and
passenger. Routinely each day’s operation starts with the ticketing officer drawing circles with
numbers and crossing those seat numbers that have been reserved. Finally, after buying the ticket
the buyer informed the identification number used for arrival time and to get a service. The users
full name will not displayed to anyone except him/herself. We keep it secret.
Weakness of the Existing System
Due to the fact that most reservation systems are human-driven, it gives room for the following
identified weakness:
• Existing system is totally on book and thus a great amount of manual work has to
be done.
• The amount of manual work increases exponentially with increase in bus
services.
• Needs a lot of working staff and extra attention on all the records.
• There are various problems like keeping records of items, seats available, prices
of per/seat and fixing bill generation on each bill.
• Finding out details regarding any information is very difficult, as the user has to
go through all the books manually.
• Major problem is the lack of security

After carrying out the analysis on the present system and thus highlighting its shortcomings, the
researcher considered the option of introducing an innovative, efficient and effective system to
implement the advance booking and reservation policy. The system is very simple in design and
to implement. The system requires very low system resources and the system will work in
almost all configurations. It has got following features
• Ensure data accuracy.
• Records are efficiently maintained by DBMS.
• DBMS also provides security for the information.
• Any person across the world, having internet can access this service.
• Seat numbers are auto generated
• Reservations can be cancelled.
• Minimum time needed for the various processing.
• Better Service.
• Minimum time required.
• This would help the corporation prepare and organize its schedules more
efficiently on the basis of traffic demand.
• Personalized services.
• Optimization of manpower available.

2.3 Feasibility study

2.4 Project requirements (Functional vs nonfunctional)

Functional Requirements
Functional requirements define the specific functions that the system performs, along with the
data operated on by the functions. The functional requirements are presented in scenarios that
depict an operational system from the perspective of its end users. Included are one or more
examples of all system features and an enumeration of all the specific requirements associated
with these features.
• The system shall incorporate mechanism to authenticate its users
• The system shall verify and validate all user input and should notify in case of error
detection and should help the user in error correction
• The system shall allow sharing of files in the system
• The system shall allow quick messages to be exchanged without face to face interaction

Non-Functional Requirement
Non-functional requirements address aspects of the system other than the specific functions it
performs. These aspects include system performance, costs, and such general system
characteristics as reliability, security, and portability. The non-functional requirements also
address aspects of the system development process and operational personnel. It includes the
following:
• The system shall be user friendly and consistent
• The system shall provide attractive graphical interface for the user
• The system shall allow developer access to installed environment
The system shall target customer base
2.5 Data dictionary
 CHAPTER 4: IMPLEMENTATION
4.1 Implementation requirements
1. Programming language
2. Running involvement (Platform)
3. Software used
4. Hardware required
4.2 Experimentation
4.3 Testing
4.4 Documentation
4.5 Evaluation
CHAPTER 5: RESULT AND DISCUSSION
CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION