TripBuddy

Inspiration

Most of the organizations have resumed and mandated work from office post pandemic for better productivity. The number of people who have started travelling in their private vehicles has risen leading to increase in traffic congestion, and air pollution. Moreover, students like us who are new to the country face difficulties in commuting and have to rely on public transportation that consumes a lot of time and efforts as affording a private car is beyond our means due to the high fuel costs. According to our research, trip-sharing can save up to thousands of dollars per annum and if 100 people carpool each day, it will lead to an annual reduction of 1320 pounds of carbon monoxide and 2736000 pounds of carbon dioxide in the air. These factors inspired us to create an out-of-the-box trip sharing application that would provide smart optimal safe routes resulting in a greener environment.

What it does

After a driver enters the start and end points, the program will determine the best route to the destination by retrieving data from INRIX's Routing APIs, taking into account the average speed, total time required by all feasible routes, and a summary of the routes, before adding the trip to the cloud database, which offers real-time data accessibility. We display all the possible routes fetched from INRIX APIs and display overlaying waypoints on Google maps API. The software will direct potential passengers to the driver who is taking the same or a comparable route when they search for a destination.

How we built it

With the Front-end employing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Bootstrap, we have constructed a solid three-tier architecture. We have used Spring, Spring Boot, and Groovy for the application server. Connecting to the web and application server has been done through REST API requests. We used Firestore, a cloud-based database, for real-time data accessibility. We've let loose the magic of INRIX's routing APIs, such as FindRoute, GetRoute, and GetRouteTravelTimes, which offer integrated traffic-influenced routing services like the fastest route based on traffic and other factors which forecasts journey time. Our application can provide better options depending on time and route complexity because of the full route data it has access to.

Challenges we ran into

Since most of us had no prior experience with restricted APIs, we first had trouble obtaining authentication tokens for the INRIX API. But thanks to our hackathon mentors and the INRIX documentation, we were able to dynamically update our tokens in the end. The toughest challenge was putting route points found using the INRIX API onto Google maps.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We take pride in meeting deadlines and providing a user-friendly UI, thorough presentation, and working project with a good number of features in such a short period of time. We are pleased to have developed a strong rapport with our team members and mentors, which makes the work atmosphere more enjoyable while still allowing us to concentrate on coming up with an original solution that follows current market trends. We were able to break up large projects into manageable subtasks and we knew which technologies to employ, which helped us save a lot of time and effort.

What we learned

-Integrating INRIX APIs -Integrating interactive MAP API. -Good HandsOn using Postman -Following appropriate SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) -Managing time -Thinking out of the box in limited time. -Enhancing soft skills -Networking with people. -Working with new people as team members.

What's next for TripBuddy

SCALABILITY

Processing is done in back-end via custom REST APIs, database is cloud-based and front-end elegantly handles UI. Hence, Heavy load with multiple requests can be easily handled .The solution can be easily converted to Mobile Applications- iOS and Android

CARPOOLING WITH COLLEAGUES AND ENHANCING SAFETY

Enhancing by adding filters to include employees of the same organization. Analyzing the statistics of police-reported incidents since 2018 as a parameter thus allowing the driver to take the safest route possible