E-payment for public transport report- A project done to digitise and better public transportation in Uganda.

Abstract

The existing modes of payment for public transport involve use of cash, sending the money by mobile money and other traditional means. Thus a given passenger may be required to pay at the entry point to the Public service Van or at exit point.

This means that in case a passenger is supposed to pay at exit point, a passenger can enter the van without money and therefore end up not paying. Also there is no clear cut to explicitly show how much was collected on a given single day by the driver to the owner of the Public service Van. Some passengers board a service vehicle that belong to thieves and they end up being robbed and actually some of them even being murdered by these gangs just because there is no system that verifies genuine Public service Van.

The objective of this report is to give a comprehensive summary of the E-payment for Public transport that has been developed to address such and many more challenges faced by the Public transport sector in the country. The E-payment system for public transport is an improvement of the current modes of payment which ensures excellence just by a passenger swiping his or her card on the embedded kit and then the money deducted immediately when they swipe at exit points. With the system, the different categories of users that is to say; the administrator, owner of the public transport van and the passenger can login to the web based interface and do different operations with the system like checking the amount collected by the owner and checking the account balance by the passenger. This report explains the design of the E-payment system for Public transport to meet specifications. The system consists mainly four major components namely; Embedded payment kit, Swiping card and the web interface. The E-payment System for public transport that was implemented is a combination of hardware and embedded software. The hardware components include; Microcontroller (Arduino Mega), GSM module, swiping card, RFID and other components as described in the System Requirement Specification.