SMART Room Finder

Project Abstract / Summary : Background
Finding a free conference room for the meetings in any organization is quite laborious, tedious and has high failure rates. This is because most of the times; rooms are booked but are not used and not released in a timely manner. Thus the conference room calendar does not have an up to date data.
The amount of time spent by people in finding a room is unproductive and inefficient.
We are proposing a ONE Click Mobile app “Smart Room Finder” and this will take care of all the problems and difficulties while faced booking the conference room.
Our RFID based app keeps a list of free rooms and can quickly find out the nearest room based on location provided in no time thereby reducing the time and efforts and this helps in improving the organization’s productivity and efficiency.

Overview
The idea is to build a real time App/System based on RFID. The App/System will provide the updated information about the conference room in an efficient manner. Users will be notified to the nearest conference room based on their requirements and availability.
1. RFID reader will be installed in every room. The entrance and exit of the room are controlled by this RFID Reader.
2. Cloud will hold the database containing the information’s of
-Number of buildings and floors
-Conference rooms in each floor
-Status of conference room
-Conference room details (Occupancy capacity and assets like projector, boards etc.)
-Authorized person details
-The status of the room is set as occupied or vacant based on the number of people moving in and moving out.
-When person moves in, the room status is updated as booked.
-When all the people move out, the room status is updated as free.
-As soon as the booking duration gets expired, the notification is sent to the authorized person.
3. Users will be able to locate the nearest conference room based on the following search criteria
- Floor Number
- Building Number
- Occupancy Capacity
- Internet Connection/WiFi
-Telephone
- Projector
- Board
4. The app also has a static map of all the conference rooms of all the co-located buildings of a single site.
Hence it can provide a tentative direction to the people to locate their nearest conference room.

Pictorial Summary


Why did you choose to work on this project topic : Why?
Booking a conference room is the MOST cumbersome task; and the amount of time and energy spent on this task is highly unproductive and inefficient. Most of the corporates and organization are having a tough task in managing this. They spent a lot of money and resources in educating employees and the best practices to be followed for booking the conference room.
The cost of installing one time RFID readers for each of the conference room will be just outweighed by multiplying the average time a person loses and the salary per hour.
In the mobile world, where everything is so quick right from booking tickets online to day to day food, wasting time running on a floor for a conference room is absurd.
The proposed solution is cost effective and will improve the overall productivity of the organizations.

Importance
A one click conference room finder will save not only time and energy of the employees but will also reduce the human dependency. It will be one stop solution for a single site to find a free room.
We are using technology effectively to bring down the tedious & laborious task of booking a conference room to a one click solution. Users will be able to book the conference room while on move through the mobile app. There would be a onetime cost to install the RFID readers, but the gain in productivity and efficiency will make it cost effective in longer term.

Future Scope
This project can be enhanced by incorporating multi-site buildings with different geographical locations which are remotely located. GPS based system will help the person in tracking the location of the appropriate building with respect to the current location of the person.
Another approach is to implement this solution is putting the IP based telephone in the conference rooms. A single press on the configured telephone button will book the conference room and then pressing it again would change the status of the room to free. It will be user’s responsibility to just maintain the discipline of pressing the conference room button while coming in or out.

Project Highlights : This idea is a simple, faster and 1 click solution for one of the top bothering problems in any company. The design could be integrated into existing infrastructure within a company or can be a completely new solution for the newer location. It is a scalable, elastic model which can be easily extended to not only single site but also multiple sites within different geographies.


Project Category : CS / IT / Networking
------------------------------------------------------
Institute/College Name: Chitkara University
City: Rajpura
State: Punjab
Participating Team From: Final Year