1.1 Introduction
Vehicle Rental System (VRS) is a web based system for a company that rents out cars. This system enables the company to make their services available to the public through the internet and also keep records about their services. The world has become a place where there is a lot of technological development; where every single thing done physically has been transformed into computerized form. Nowadays, people’s activities have been transformed into work done by computerized systems. One of which is the main target of this project which is about Vehicle Rental System. The system of renting cars exist back in the previous years, were people rent cars for their personal reasons. Vehicle renting is essential to many peoples’ plan to travel or move from one place to another for business purposes, tour, and visit or holidays, for these reasons Vehicle renting is very helpful.
As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.
1.2 Background of Study
Vehicle renting became more popular as years pass by. Today Vehicle renting services is found all over the world, especially in the developed and developing countries. To make this service more popular and accessible to the public it has been transform into a web base system and connected to the internet were everyone can be able to have access to it.
The vehicle rental and tracking systems are designed to assist corporations with large number of automobiles and several usage purposes. A Fleet management system can minimize the cost and effort of employees to finish road assignments within a minimal time. Besides, assignments can be scheduled in advanced based on current automobiles location. Therefore, central fleet management is essential to large enterprises to meet the varying requirements of customers and to improve the productivity (Krishna et al., 2010). So taking in action all these things we are going to design and develop a machine, which will track the real time location of the vehicle using blue tooth technology with the help of an android base mobile phones. The ability to accurately detect a vehicle's location and its status is the main goal of automobile trajectory monitoring systems. These systems are implemented using several hybrid techniques that include: wireless communication, geographical positioning and embedded applications. The vehicle tracking systems are designed to assist corporations with large number of automobiles and several usage purposes. This system can minimize the cost and effort of employees to finish road assignments within a minimal time. So taking in action all these things we are going to design and develop a machine, which will track the real time location of the vehicle using blue tooth technology with the help of an android base mobile phones. The main goals of this project is to design and develop an economical model, which requires less power with less complex in structure, easy to implement. An additional setting could be implemented to interface the system to the car's alarm to alert the owner on his cell phone if the alarm is set off.
1.3 Statement of the Problem
Based on the research done, some car rental companies still use desktop application for their car rental services and thus making it to be limited to so many important feature that are not available unlike in the web based application where there are so many feature available. Also some upcoming companies do not only make use of these desktop applications, but also make use of phone call reservation, which is still lacking so many features that are needed for this type of system. Therefore, going by this method a lot of problems are encountered which includes:
- Conflicting multiple registrations; caused by assigning a unique identification number to more than one vehicle.
- Difficulty in information retrieval; because of the bulk of registration papers consuming a large space.
- Loss of vehicle due to wrong information provide during car rental form fill up.
- Waste of time caused by manually verifying the validity of a rented vehicle.
1.4 Aim and Objectives of Study
The aim of the study is to design and develop a Computerized Transportation Vehicle Rental System. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows to design and develop a software that will:
- Provide a better, easier and more efficient method of vehicle rental and tracking.
- Allow for the generation and assignment of an infinite unique identification number to rental vehicles for tracking purpose.
- Develop a web based system that will help manage the business transactions of Vehicle renting.
- Help in advertising the car rental services of a company, through the availability of the system online.
1.5 Significance of Study
The following are the relevance of the study:
- The Vehicle Rental System to keep detail records of both the cars and the customers, the duration they rent car as well as the type of car they rent.
- The system will be mainly design for small a company that renders it car rental services to customers.
- The system will have the ability to generate and print invoice for each successful transaction.
The research project will help solve the numerous problems associated with the manual way of doing things. Errors, waste of precious time will be eliminated with the system. This will in turn enhance productivity and efficiency in the organization.
1.6 Scope of the Study
The study focuses on the Design and Implementation of a Computerized Transportation Vehicle Rental System. The system will be designed using MYSQL and PHP programming languages.
1.7 Limitations of the Study
During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:
- Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
- Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
- Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
- Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet).
1.8 Definitions of Terms
Commercial vehicle: This is any vehicle used within the campus for commercial purposes.
De-registration: This is the process of cancelling all registration pertaining to a vehicle
Directorate of transport: This is a department in every campus mostly controlled by the student’s union government that oversees the activities of commercial vehicles.
