Vehicle Services and Road-Side Assistance Portal

Abstract

Vehicles have become a vital component of the life of each and everyone in the society. Most of the people tend to use a personal vehicle due to difficulties they face in public transport in Sri Lanka. However, with the use of vehicle, the next thing comes in is vehicle maintenance and repair. In most scenarios, vehicle owners face the difficulty in finding a proper mechanic / service station to repair or perform routine maintenance of their vehicles. On the other hand, there are plenty of mechanics / service stations in the country with plenty of expertise to perform above mentioned repairs or routine maintenance, who are struggling to find proper customer base. As a solution for this problem, my client Rapid Taxies (Pvt) Ltd. requested to come up with a suitable system to interconnect vehicle owners and mechanics. To address the above-mentioned problem, a web-based portal and a mobile application was proposed as a platform to interconnect vehicle owners and mechanics, based on their location, required expertise and preferences. This system was developed with the combination of Agile Methodology and Throw-away prototyping. Throw-away prototyping was mainly used to design the User Interface of the portal for client’s approval and Agile Programming was mainly used for the functional development of the system. With the use of this system, vehicle owners would be able to find nearby mechanics based on their vehicle type and location. In the same way, mechanics would also be able to find nearby vehicle owners who are seeking their support. The developed system, web site and the mobile application will be evaluated against the detailed requirements specified in this dissertation under Chapter 2. This dissertation compiles the areas addressed through the developed system, analysis of the problem, system design and implementation areas. Finally, it is argued that the challenges that the developer had to face while implementing each stage of the developed system as well as the future implementations and expansions of the project.