Современные информационные технологии / 3.Программное обеспечение

Kuzochkina A.O.

Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics

MOBILE APPLICATION FOR INTEGRATION OF SEVERAL TIMETABLES

The current work is dedicated to huge amount of efforts people spend on timing their work. Nowadays lots of organizations and enterprises can have several separate and independent schedules. They may be located in completely different sources and do not cooperate with each other, for example daily chart of pairs of students, curriculum of sporting sections and distance learning. Therefore, it is very inconvenient each time going to the different services to see what awaits in the near future. The goal of this work to create a single application that would integrate and synchronize the schedules of students and lecturers for more convenient and quick organization of educational process.

KEYWORDS: TIMETABLE; INTEGRATION; SERVICE; MOBILE APP

A schedule or a timetable, as a basic time-management tool, consists of a list of times at which possible tasks, events, or actions are intended to take place, or of a sequence of events in the chronological order in which such things are intended to take place.

Publicly available schedules reflect information that is generally made available to the public, so that members of the public can plan certain activities around them. These may include things like hours of operation of businesses, tourist attractions, transportation schedules, concerts and sporting.

An internal schedule is a schedule that is only of importance to the people who must directly abide by it. It has been noted: “Groups often begin with a schedule imposed from the outside, but effective groups also develop an internal schedule that sets goals for the completion of micro-tasks”. Such an organization can reduce the planning costs. Optimization of the schedule refers to operations research.

A timetable is a kind of schedule that sets out times at which specific events are intended to occur. It may also refer to:

- school timetable, a table for coordinating students, teachers, rooms, and other resources;

- time horizon, a fixed point of time in the future at which point certain processes will be evaluated or assumed to end;

- timeline, a project artefact. It is typically a graphic design showing a long bar labelled with dates alongside itself and (usually) events labelled on points where they would have happened.

Let us consider on the school and university timetables. School timetables usually cycle every week or every fortnight. The university timetable provides details about the teaching arrangements for most topics, and indicates the semester taught, and the days, times and locations of lectures, tutorials and other types of classes. Optimization of timetable is one of the major factors that can significantly optimize the educational process.

The aim of this work to create a mobile application that should union and synchronize the timetables of students and lecturers for more convenient and quick organization of educational process.

The relevance of the work lies in the fact that at present lots of organizations and enterprises can have several separate and independent schedules. They may be located in completely different sources and do not cooperate with each other, for example daily chart of pairs of students, curriculum of sporting. No less important thing is to solve the problem of the control measures planned by the students in the system of distance learning, i.e., combination of schedules and student organizer. Therefore, it is very uncomfortable go to different services and see what awaits in the near future every time.

Mobile application for integration of several timetables – is an application designed to integrate and synchronize the timetables of the university and keep all needed information in single app.

The architecture of the software product looks like the following and contains such fundamental parts:

- database layer, which consists of all required models, has access to the db and stores the information about the system, user settings and personal preferences;

- server layer, which are processed requests from the outside and carries out the synchronization of timetables;

- API-services layer, which has access to the server part. Clients send requests to the API and get responses with needed data;

- client layer, which consists of mobile client designed for Android, for control gear system.

For the implementing server part, the C# programming language is used. Entity Framework is used to work with the database. The IIS server performs the deployment.

Application integrates two university timetables: the common curriculum of students and distance learning. So the server communicates with APIs of the services for these timetables. At the entrance, our API takes JSON-objects that contain the timetables files. The server generates a transformed suite of the schedules essential parts and creates a new JSON-object. Then the object is transmitted to the mobile application, where client side parse it like a single timetable.

For the client communication with the server an HTTPS connection is used to improve safety during the data transfer.

The client was implemented for Android OS using Android SDK and the Java programming language. The data from mobile applications is sent to the server through API and is updated in the main database.

Client side supports custom filters, if there is a need somehow differentiate timetables from each individual service. Part owned by each individual service is painted with some colour selected by user.

Also, future releases will provide the opportunity to generate a custom schedules range. This feature will allow optimizing traffic. The application can be distributed and installed on mobile devices and tablets locally via apk-file or downloaded from store.

The main advantage of this software solution is its distribution through mobile platforms, which provides a wide range of opportunities for feedback and application optimization. In particular, it is possibly to add calendar schedules with the ability to add user's own timetables, for example, using a csv-file.

Due to the fact that all the main elements of the system are separated, it allows the system to scale well, allowing users to have access not only to the university schedule, but also the ability to the ability to synchronize with any other apps, whether Google Calendar, Trello or other services for the time organization. This architecture is well suited to cloud computing (i.e. Microsoft Azure, Amazon, IBM Cloud and so on).

Thus, this software integrates separate schedules and allows the user to use time more rational. The effectiveness of this solution is also improved because as a target platform used mobile application, so the schedule is convenient to use throughout the working or school day.

Literature:

1. DMOZ - Computers: Software: Educational: Administration and School Management: Scheduling Utilities". [Electronic resource]. – Access mode: URL: DMOZ.org. – 25/03/2017.

2. H. Adeli, Construction Scheduling, Cost Optimization and Management / Hojjat Adeli, Asim Karim – London: Spon Press, 2001. – p. 178.

3. O. Zwikael Project Management for the Creation of Organisational Value / Ofer Zwikael, John Smyrk – London: Springer, 2011. – p. 359.