Ride Buddy, a Carpooling mobile application for Android users

Our motto: “Get or give a ride just a click away” inspired us to build “RIDE BUDDY”, a real-time carpooling and ride sharing mobile application. There are many universities where the students face a common problem of commuting to their desired location, as many of them cannot afford to rent or have their own car. Most of the universities do not have public transportation, cab facilities like “Uber” and “Lyft”, which should be treated as a major problem.

This application will ease the commuting problems of all students. “Ride Buddy” would not only serve students who need a ride but will also allow students who have cars to help others. A student who has a car and willing to give a ride can post that he/she is going to a particular destination at a particular time, a student who needs a ride can look in to the different rides available and pick one contact that student who is giving a ride . A student can request a ride to a particular place and time.

Download RideBuddy application working model here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bybcx61GTOE4MUhmVFlVSmNoc00

Approach / Methodology:

We implemented our application using Waterfall methodology.

Waterfall model

Route Match Algorithm:

Using Google Maps Directions API, we encode the two routes of person A and person B.
Find the point P on A's route, which is closest to the start location of B. Use the haversine formula to calculate distance between points. If there is no point found within 1 mile proximity from person A and person B, terminate by stating that routes don’t overlap.
Taking A's route and starting from point P, iterate through B's location points from start point, and calculate the distance between the corresponding location points.
Repeat above process for all possible alternative routes for A and B until longest overlap route, if any, is found.

Under System design and development of our application, "Ride Buddy" these are the UML diagrams that we designed for our project.