CSIRO Software to Solve Canberra Taxi Shortage

This morning I was interviewed on ABC 666 Local Radio Canberra about the popularity of wireless broadband. While waiting to be interviewed there was an item on problems with Canberra's taxis coping with peak demands from conferences and parliamentary sittings. So I mentioned I was a member of the CSIRO Taxishare project, as described in YingYi Chen's Android Taxishare Client Application. This is software for mobile phones and the web to allow people to arrange to share taxis. It is being tested internally by CSIRO,. but should be applicable to Canberra, where people need to get between the airport, Parliament House.

CSIRO employees are over all Australia. The employees often have business trips by domestic flight in Australia. Multiple taxis are used by CSIRO employees from an airport to the same CSIRO sites or events. Sharing same cab or rental vehicle with other employees travelling to the same final destination becomes an issue. To solve this issue, CSIRO develops a system called Taxishare system as a CSIRO internal service.

In order to improve user experience on Taxishare system, Taxishare client application is designed to provide a rich and friendly graphical user interface and a touch-screen control for end users on Google Android mobile platform. Within a tight development schedule, software engineering and project management techniques involve in application development life-cycle to solve issues and mitigate risks. Multiple design choices apply in different development iterations. A solution is selected by comparing different user interface designs and different architecture choices to achieve final
Taxishare client application project objective.

Limitations of Taxishare system and Taxishare client application are discovered by development team during the Taxishare client application development. Suggestions of improvement and enhancement on further development of Taxishare system are presented in the report.

From: Android Taxishare Client Application, Development Report Software Engineering Project COMP8790, YingYi Chen, College of Engineering and Computer Science, The Australian National University, June 4, 2010