Abstract

The use of buses traveling is a large growing business in Cameroon and other countries; the manual use of bus reservation is presently very strenuous and also consumes a lot of time by having to stay in a long queue.

For this reason, an efficient system is to be proposed in this project to ease the issue of bus reservation amongst indigenes within the country.  The system is a web-based application that allows visitors to check bus availability, buy and pay for bus tickets online.

In this project, the proposed bus reservation system is developed using Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML), PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), Structure Query Language (SQL), Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), and JavaScript.

General Introduction

Bus Ticket Booking during the offline era posed various difficulties to the customers as wells as the bus operators. Offline ticket booking reduced the scope of customers to choose different options based on their travel criteria [1].

It also increased the franchising cost for the bus operators. At the same time, the bus operators were also finding it difficult to monitor their bus seat filling information. Many small and medium bus service organizations do not have their own online bus ticket booking system.

Online bus ticketing reservation system web portal is a total internet ticketing operation offering the benefits of the total in-house management of bus schedules, ticket bookings, ticket sales, report generation, and other business functions associated with ticket sales [2].

It also offers the power of decision-making to customers to make a ticket booking through bus operators’ popularity, performance, and ranking.

Basic components of an online bus ticketing system web portal should consist of the following [2].

• The capture of customer information such as name, phone number, and address.
• Seating chart
• Bus operators ranking
• Search engine
• Payment information
• Organization’s advertisements/ slogan/ phone number and address
• Comments and suggestions section/ option

This ticketing system has 3 modules. The first module helps the customer to enquire about the availability of seats in a particular bus at a particular date. The second module helps to reserve a ticket and the module helps the customer to cancel a reserved ticket.

This work is structured into three chapters of which;

1. Chapter one: which comprises of; An overview of the project which talks of introduction and motivation, Literature Review, Aims and objectives, and Project plan)
2. Chapter two: which comprises; Methodology and Design, Introduction, System block diagram and description, System design (software and hardware design considerations and Prototype of the system)

• Chapter three: which comprises of; Implementation, tests, results, and discussion, General conclusion, References, and Appendices)

 Aims and Objectives of the Study

Aims of the Project

An online bus ticket booking reservation system which is a web-based application designed using PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is aimed at helping customers book seats and buses with ease.

 Objectives of the Project

At the end of this work, we intend to achieve the following objectives;

• To provide a website where information about Bus can be stored and viewed by passengers.
• To enable customers, check the time of departure and arrival for every bus through the system
• To be able to retrieve and update records
• To ease the bus ticket payment by paying through Momo
• To provide anytime anyplace service for the customer. Customers can buy tickets 24hours a day, 7 days a week over the internet.

Project Plan

The design and implementation of the system were accomplished using the following step [13].

Step 1: Understanding the topic

In order to successfully go through this project, it is good to first have a good understanding of the project topic and what the topic is all about, and what is required of it.

Step 2: Look at the work of others on the same topic or a similar topic.

Before anything else, after understanding the topic very well and all that it entails, we then do good research about what other people have done with the same topic. The aim of this step is to gain inside knowledge and ideas to better design the system.

Step 3: Propose an improved Design

After going through what others have done in this same topic, an improved design is proposed for the system to make it better and more efficient.

Step 4: I test the Design

After proposing an improved design of the system, we move forward to implement or program the system so as to test the design to see if it does exactly what we intended the system to do.

Step 5: Modify the design if need be

After testing the proposed improved design of the system and it gives the desired result expected, we may not need to modify the design again but if after the testing we don’t get the desired results expected, we can now modify the design.

Step 6: Implementing the design

After testing and modifying the design, if need be, we now implement the said design on the system to get exactly what we want the system to look like or be.