Trotro Pass: Ghanaian Commercial Vehicle Passenger Accounting System

Abstract

Commercial transport in Ghana is generally unsupervised; vehicle owners and transport managers alike lack tools to properly monitor and track the performance of drivers. Usually, fixed amounts are given to drivers as a daily goal, anything more than that is payment for the driver's services. This fixed amount is usually based on intuition and not on statistical data that at least estimates how much a driver makes in a day of commute. This project is intended to give commercial vehicle managers the ability to track location of vehicles and cumulatively estimate how much money is being made, up until end of a day of commute. This is achieved through a design that makes use of a distributed collection of embedded systems in the vehicle, equipped with GPS and cellular data connection, which would transmit and store information on a server. A user-friendly application would then query and display in real time the location of vehicles and estimate amount made so far up until end of the day. With feasibility and cost in mind some solutions are adopted and modified if need be. This coupled with embedded system design and software engineering, we develop a system that accomplishes the stated goals. An accuracy of 89.4% was achieved in our cumulative travel distance measurements.