DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A TRANSPORT SYSTEM USING SEARCH ALGORITHM

1.1 Introduction

Transportation is a basic requirement for every nation, regardless of its industrial capacity, population size or technological development. The Nigerian transport systems, right from inception, were poorly designed and are unable to scale up to meet greater demand, a design flaw which causes traffic congestion on roads, overstressed railways, faltering airfields, and mass-transport blind spots (Igwe, 2010). Road Transport System permits a customer to know the information about the bus schedule and ticket. It is a complex system that is difficult to be managed by human, so as a result software system can be used instead of human, which will help to avoid a big percent of mistakes. Transport System make process of scheduling trips more easier and prevent conflicting in time, also it help customers to book their tickets from their homes and checks the pricing system of the routes, the price of ticket may increase or decrease depending on the season, availability, time of booking, and also depending on the class that customer select and all these factors will be calculated automatically and instantly.

As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.

1.2 Background of Study

The transportation community has experienced the beginnings of a cultural shift toward embedding transportation system management and operation into our culture, work ethic Manufacturers, distributors, and third-party logistics companies all have specific business needs and processes concerning the movement of goods and product from sourcing locations to factories to distribution warehouses and retail or customer locations. The movement of product between locations is frequently controlled by software applications referred to as ”automated transportation system. To support improved efficiencies in the transportation process, companies will look for an automated transportation system that fits their current and planned operational needs and that can be integrated smoothly with existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) or corporate financial systems.

An algorithm is a set of instructions which describes how to solve a problem. A search algorithm takes a problem as input and returns the solution in the form of an action sequence. Once the solution is found, the actions it recommends can be carried out. As far as search algorithm is concerned, it is a global problem solving mechanism in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Search algorithms are used for a multitude of Artificial Intelligence tasks, one of them is path finding. Artificial Intelligence area of search is very much connected to problem solving. Artificial Intelligence has investigated search methods that allow one to solve path planning problems in large domains; having formulated problems we need to solve them and it is done by searching through the state space. During this process a search tree is generated by taking initial state and applying the successive function to it. Most of the researches on search methods have studied how to solve one-shot path-planning problems. Search is mostly a repetitive process therefore many Artificial Intelligence systems replan from scratch and it solves the path planning problem independently. The problem becomes more severe when changes occur during planning, fortunately, the changes to the path planning problems are usually small.

Heuristic search methods promise to find the shortest path for path planning problems that are faster than uniformed search methods. On the other hand incremental search methods promise to find shortest path for series of similar path planning problem faster, which is possible by solving each path planning problem from scratch. Travel planning is now becoming a vast field and for the economy of any country, it plays vital role. Artificial intelligence is playing a major role in this field. Many travel planners using heuristic and uniformed algorithms are giving better results than the ordinary travel planners. Both search and graph Artificial Intelligence algorithms are used in travel planning which makes any travel planner user friendly and time saving.

In this research work, the main subject has been the search algorithms used in the travel planning search for better routes, destination and transport system enabling the customer to build his best travel plan for his desired trip, however, we will confine ourselves to three basic search algorithms which are Depth first search algorithm, Breadth first search algorithm and hill climbing search algorithm. Breadth first search is a general technique of traversing a graph. It may use more memory but will always find the shortest path first. In this search a queue data structure is used and it is level by level traversal. Depth first search (DFS) is an important type of uniform or blind search. DFS visits all the vertices in the graph. This type of algorithm always chooses to go deeper into the graph.

The term automated transportation system refers to Transportation Management Systems that allow users to manage inbound and outbound freight shipments by highway, rail, and air. Present automated transportation systems allow users to electronically prepare shipping document s, determine best rates, manage transportation bills. It is a subset of supply chain management concerning transportation operation. A typical scenario of the application of automated transportation system include procurement and shipping orders to be evaluated by the planning module offering the various the user various suggested routing solutions. These solutions are evaluated by the user for reasonableness and are passed along to the transportation provider analysis module to select the best mode and least cost provider. Once the best provider is selected, the solution typically moves on to the next module of payments.

1.3 Statement of the Problem

Investigation revealed that ample facilities like road infrastructure, appropriate vehicles for the right place and right time is a crucial factor in determining the quality of transport system. For a developing country like Nigeria, this has always been a great challenge and continues to be so. Owing to the civil wars, lack of proper investment in the transport infrastructure, low quality of the transport system, unhealthy transport solutions, improper planning and increasing number of private cars still remains a problem.

Hence, there is need to optimize our transport system. This study aims at using a search algorithm to optimize the transport system in terms of shortest path, speed and efficiency. The search algorithm to be used will be arrived at after comparatively analyzing three basic search algorithms namely; breadth first, depth first and hill climbing, after which the best will be chosen for the optimization of our transport system.

1.4 Aim and Objectives of the Study

The aim of this study is to design and implement a Computerized Transport System Using Search Algorithm. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows:

1. To create a system that can be used to record transportation records to database;
2. To develop a novel hybrid search algorithm for a transportation system;
3. To determine the best search algorithm for a transport system; and
4. To implement the novel hybrid search algorithm using a computer system.

1.5 Significance of Study

This research work is of great importance in that it seeks to provide innovative services relating to different modes of transport and enable various users to be better informed and make safer, more coordinated and smarter use of transport networks. Other significance it offers is found in the following areas;

1. It reduces preprocessing efforts on the path of transport planners.
2. It showcases the usefulness of algorithms in the field of shortest path finding.
3. It aids journey planning on transportation systems.

The system is also of significance in that it covers the three major kinds of transportation of freight namely; air, land and sea. The implication of this is that any module can be used independent of other modules. The study will also be useful to other researchers seeking for information on the subject.

1.6 Scope of Study

The scope of the study focuses on the Design and Implementation of a Transport System Using Search Algorithm. The proposed system will cover only Akwa Ibom Transport Company (AKTC) in Nigeria.

1.7 Limitations of the Study

During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:

1. Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
2. Establishment Policies: Establishment policies posed a serious limitation as most staffs are not ready to release information needed for this project work. There were lots of information needed from the staffs of this institution to enhance the study which took them time to release or they did not release at all for security purposes, hence the scope was reduced.
3. Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
4. Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
5. Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet).

1.8 Definition of Terms

Transportation: Conveyance of somebody or something: the act or business of carrying somebody or something from one place to another, usually in a vehicle

Information: Facts or knowledge provided or learned.

Travel: To be on a journey, often for pleasure or business, and with luggage; to go from one place to another.