Design and implementation of a web-based application for bicycle rentals with GPS tracking

Abstract

Bicycle rentals is a growing business in developed countries. It is a great investment that offers people a means of transportation, and allows for innovation in the fields of Internet of Things and Embedded Systems. Throughout this work, our main goal is to design and implement a web application for a bicycle rental shop by providing a user-friendly software for both customers and administrators navigating the system. The application allows the users to reserve bicycles, start and finish transactions, browse the various bicycle types and subscription plans that the shop has to offer, redeem and use coupons for interesting reductions in transaction prices and it finally offers customers the possibility to rent their bicycles through the shop. All of this data can be easily stored and monitored in a database with the help of C#’s ASP.NET Core framework. In order to condition our software system to the real-world application, we propose an implementation of a GPS Tracking device that should be able to update the location of a bicycle in real-time. This trackability offers additional security and further information display. This implementation is achieved using a microcontroller-based system which offers simplicity and reduces expenses. The wide range of available peripherals provides versatility and flexibility in the design process. It is important to note that, even though this project was designed with only a single bicycle rental shop in mind, the overall system can be easily upgraded to handle multiple shops of different vehicle types, such as motorcycles, cars, trucks… etc.