CS 8803 AIAD
PROJECT PROPOSAL-INSTANT CAR POOLING
TEAM#2
CS 8803 AIAD PROJECT PROPOSAL
INSTANT CAR POOLING ON THE
ANDROID PLATFORM
Vinaya Shenoy
Parikshit Sudumbrekar
Madhura Tipnis
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CS 8803 AIAD
PROJECT PROPOSAL-INSTANT CAR POOLING
TEAM#2
Project Motivation and Objectives:
With increasing convergence between different technologies like the cellular world, internet (IP)
world, different applications have become popular and many more are under development. One
of the prominent services popular amongst the users is the "Location Based Services" and
"presence". The current location-based services out there in the market use the policy of
'broadcasting locations' while enabling any activity between the various users. This may lead to
unintended recipients being the beneficiary of certain events. With this in mind, we aim to
develop an application/service that would enable selective delivery of events/messages to the
intended recipients based on their location. This would help in avoiding thousands of messages
being sent to unintended recipients.
The objective of this project is to enable events (having a very short time to live or those which
need to be serviced immediately) being delivered to the intended recipients for their immediate
service. The ultimate goal is to develop a car pooling application wherein any individual at a
very short notice could generate an event requesting a car pool to go from location A to location
B. The event could also contain the route the person desires to travel on. Based on this
information and the location of the person, the event would be delivered to only those recipients
who are within a pre-defined radius from that location. This event could further be enhanced by
using Google maps to give directions regarding the exact location of the person initiating the
event.
With this aim under consideration, we hope to present a stripped-down application that would
provide all the basic functionalities of the overall application. The objectives for this project can
be listed as follows:
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Development of an application that would enable users to generate events
Enabling the users to send the event to recipients they selected from their contact list.
Enabling the recipients to respond with either a yes or a no. Whenever the recipient
responds with a yes, his location co-ordinates are sent back to the event initiator.
Creation of a Google Map that shows the event creator the directions between his
location, the final destination address and the location of the intermediate pick-up
points, which are the locations of the recipients that have replied with a ‘yes’ to the
car pooling event message.
Demonstrating the application by using Android simulators
Related Work:
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Location tracking is the most essential thing and a definite pre requisite for any mobility
related application. This can be done in different ways.
A social tool has been developed which helps the user connect with people around him.
This tool has been developed on the Symbian Operating System. The location of the user
is detected in the cell phone by getting information from the cell tower. This application
doesn’t need GPS. Each user can keep up with what is happening with people in the
friend’s list. Broadcasting of messages is the approach followed in this tool. It also
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CS 8803 AIAD
•
PROJECT PROPOSAL-INSTANT CAR POOLING
TEAM#2
provides other features like connecting people with similar interests. It helps the user
explore various places in and around the location detected.
There is a mobile social networking service called Loopt which broadcasts the location of
the user even when the phone is closed. It also allows sending of messages or sharing of
photos between contacts. This Loopt is currently limited to the Sprint network.
Proposed Work:
We aim to build an application for the students of the Georgia Tech campus that would enable
them to generate interactive events at a very short notice. The application that would demonstrate
this functionality would be the Car Pooling application. The initiator creates a car pool event and
selects a list of friends from his contact whom he wishes to invite for the event. When the event
is created, it contains the following information:
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The subject of the event
The Time at which the event is going to take place
The vacancy in the car (The total number of friends that can be accommodated)
The address of the final destination
This event is received by all the recipients that are selected from the contact list. They get a
message stating all the above information. Further, they get an option to either accept the
invitation or decline the invitation. If the recipient responds with a ‘yes’; a list of recipients
attending the car pooling event is populated at the initiator’s end. This list is created on a ‘firstcome-first-serve’ basis. The initiator also has the facility of getting a Google Map that shows the
location of all the pick-up points (location of recipients that have responded with a yes) and the
final destination location.
The architecture that we propose makes direct communication between the event creator and all
the intended recipients. The location (in the form of latitude and longitude) of all the recipients is
forwarded back to the event creator. The diagram shows a basic high-level architecture of our
system.
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CS 8803 AIAD
PROJECT PROPOSAL-INSTANT CAR POOLING
TEAM#2
A
EI = Event Initiator
EI
B
C
D
Friends responding with their locations
and ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the event
Figure 1: Architecture Diagram
The diagram describes our architecture and the flow of communication between all the parties
present in our system. The interesting part from our project is that once the vacancies are over,
all the future recipients that respond positively are automatically sent a ‘sorry’ message with the
subject being that the Carpool is full and there is no vacancy. Thus, the event initiator does not
have to worry about looking after these issues. Thus, after specifying vacancy, the event initiator
gets the following:
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Recipients that are attending the car pool
The order of pick-up based on the order of response
The route to be taken by the initiator.
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CS 8803 AIAD
PROJECT PROPOSAL-INSTANT CAR POOLING
TEAM#2
Plan of Action:
We plan to incorporate the following technologies into our project:
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Android Platform: We plan to use the Android platform as our mobile platform. This
would give us hands-on experience in the latest of the mobile platforms. Android
platform also provides APIs for finding the geo-location of users.
Google Map: Our main focus in this project apart from message passing is the creation of
Google Maps. The map shows the path and the directions between the event creator, final
destination and all the intermediate pick-up points. The intermediate pick-up points
indicate the location of all the recipients that have responded positively to the car pool
event.
Schedule:
We plan to follow the following schedule for completing our project:
Date
Mile-Stone
Feb 10th
Project Proposal submission.
Feb 24th
Configuration of the Android platform and
performing some feasibility studies.
March 17th
Implementing the entire Front-End for the Car
Pooling application
April 7th
Implementing the Google Map functionality
and integrating it with the main project
April 14th
Begin the documentation and start the testing
process
April 23rd
Completion of the project along with the
documentation.
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CS 8803 AIAD
PROJECT PROPOSAL-INSTANT CAR POOLING
TEAM#2
Testing and Evaluation:
Due to lack of hardware at this moment we intend to test and demonstrate only on an emulator.
We will be running Android emulators on 3-4 laptops and be getting GPS location data for each
of the emulators by creating a mock location provider and/or downloading KML files of
placemarks from Google Earth and try to run the system on a wireless network. We will be
running all the test case scenarios like an invitee should not be messaged if he is not in the range
for the event, message when an invitee is in the range, etc.
The evaluation should be based on how well we manage to achieve the following objectives:
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User Interface to create the event on the cell phone
Web service to poll invitees for their locations and filter invitees on the basis of distance
from event location
Final creation of event and message communication to invitees
Future Work:
This project aims to demonstrate a stripped down car pooling application. In the future, we aim
to incorporate the following:
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Development of a web-service that handles all the communication between the users, the
Google Map creation and handling all the location information. Thus, Location privacy
issues can also be taken care of.
Development of algorithms that would help in calculating the shortest path between the
event creator, final destination and all the intermediate pick-up points.
Other features like deleting past events and showing only pending events can be thought
of.
Bibliography:
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The
Android
Competency
Center.
January
16th
2009
<http://www.androidcompetencycenter.com/tag/android-location-apis/>
Devx. January 14th 2009. < http://www.devx.com/wireless/Article/40524> Android, The
Official Site.
<http://www.android.com/#utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-ha-nausbk&utm_medium=ha&utm_term=android>
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