DIBuS
An efficient and user-friendly bus reservation system with a phone application. It also allows the users to request an additional bus in case the one they want to reserve is full.
Created on 10th October 2020
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DIBuS
An efficient and user-friendly bus reservation system with a phone application. It also allows the users to request an additional bus in case the one they want to reserve is full.
The problem DIBuS solves
The Coronavirus outbreak has highlighted several problems in the italian public transport system. Social distancing imposes a reduction in the number of available seats on public means of transport, which have shown the following problems which had been overlooked.
Seat reservation systems in Italy already exist for long distance trains and are being experimented for long distance buses.
However, our solution addresses the following problems focusing on urban buses, presenting itself as innovative and useful for both users and companies.
-Buses are usually either full or empty. This is bad for both users and companies, because users might not find a seat and companies lose potential buyers and appeal, while also wasting money on empty buses.
A really useful function is the one that allows to ask for an additional bus in case the needed one is empty. When the requests are enough, the company can decide to provide an additional bus.
-The companies can now exploit the data gained through the reservations to enforce some lines or even create new ones, while suppressing those that are useless. Moreover, they can adapt to changes in the environment (For example, one might notice that a certain line gains importance because a shop became more popular).
-Many people tend to get on the bus without a ticket. However, if the non-reserved tickets are only a small percentage, the caused money loss is reduced.
-Single fare tickets are usually unfair, but we propose a paying scheme which is proportional to the distance for which one is actually on the bus. On one hand, this might be unappealing to companies, however, being able to actually know when the user will get off the bus allows to reallocate their seat for other possible users.
Challenges we ran into
As we did not implement the system itself, the biggest problem was doing an efficient team work. Although we managed to correctly divide the workload, it was not so easy to coordinate at first, as we had not worked together before and also because having to work remotely posed several additional challenges.
The brainstorming session was quite longer than expected and we had to abandon our first idea of competing in the AI track, a decision which we regretfully but also very consciously made.
As we realized that the solution we wanted to propose was a system which was too big to implement in 36 hours, we decided to do a mockup, therefore the technical background we needed to complete the challenge became less important. However, this posed another big challenge: we had to turn ourselves into content makers.
We almost completely started from scratch with some technical instruments we needed in order to complete the project.
The trial and error process resulted to be really productive and we practiced one of the most important skills for a developer: how to learn something new in a short amount of time and deliver.
Technologies used