Carpoolio

Abstract

Carpoolio is a cross platform mobile application with the aim of facilitating carpooling in the urban areas of Pakistan. The principal target group is students and office commuters who pass through these locales on a daily basis. Such users tend to follow fixed paths and suffer from the problems of high costs of transportation, traffic congestion, and the absence of alternate convenient travel options. Carpoolio tries to solve these problems by promoting sharing of rides in a simple and reliable manner. The application is based on Flutter which provides the ability to work on multiple platforms from a common code without any issues. Firebase is used at backend, which handles the authentication, database transactions, and real-time data handling. In addition, Google Maps services are also integrated to enable location tracking, route visualization, and geo-location functionality. The integration of these technologies together ensure optimum performance as well as smooth user experience. Carpoolio provides a platform to enable drivers to provide rides, and passengers to find rides and join existing rides within the same city. The facilitation of shared rides reduces the transportation costs of the user and at the same time reduces the traffic congestion as a result of reducing the number of vehicles on the road. Consequently, the same leads to environmental benefits. The current report describes the general system design and technical architecture of the application, including the design of the user interface, the flow of navigation, and the database schema. The user interface is designed in such a way that it is simple and user-friendly which helps in user interaction with the application without any hindrance and the flow of navigation helps in smooth transition from one succeeding screen. As far as the backend is concerned, the process of registering and logging in users is employed using the services of the Firebase Authentication. Cloud Firestore is the primary database to store information of user data, ride details, and booking details. Geo-location services are facilitated using Google’s Geocoding and Maps APIs that give the precise location information and route visualization. A comparative analysis is included in the report as well, where Carpoolio is compared to other platforms like DriveLu - a Pakistan focused carpooling application - and inDrive, a global ride-hailing service. The document also addresses limitations such as lack of in-app messaging functionality, reliance on cash-based mechanisms of payment, and lack of sophisticated administrative tools.