The objective of the project is Time Table Management System for Trainees at Railways which is simple, easily understandable, and efficient website so that the teachers and students can access the time-table according to their convenience.
The candidates who pass the Railway Government Exams are given proper training for 6 months or 1 year for the work that they will do as a Railway Employee. Since being a Railway Employee is a responsible job because even a slight careless work can lead to huge loss of life of the people who are travelling via Railways. Hence a strict schedule is required for the training. So I was given the task to design a well-stablished Time-Table Management System which will be hosted on the Railway server, by which the teachers as well as the trainees can keep a proper record of their classes as well as their performance. It involved both Frontend as well as Backend Website Development.
A time-table concerns all activities with regard to producing a schedule that must be subjective to different constraints. It can be defined as the optimization of given activities, action or events to a set of objects in space-time matrix to satisfy a set of desirable constraints. A key factor in running an educational centre or an academic environment is the need for a well-planned and clash-free time-table. Earlier, when technology was not in wide use, time-tables were manually created by the institution. Every year the institutions faced the tedious task of drawing up academic time-tables that satisfies the various courses and in which lectures they were to be held. The time-table development process starts with each head of the department providing the necessary information to be used in time-table scheduling. The information required is- • Examinable courses • Dates for lectures to be held • Specified time for the lectures • The venue of the scheduled lectures
Planning time-tables is one of the most complex and error-prone applications. The available system currently builds or generates a set of time-table manually, but most times have issues with generating a clash-free and complete time-table. Serious problems like generation of high-cost time-tables are still occurring while scheduling and these problems are repeating frequently.
The objective of the project is Time Table Management System for Trainees at Railways which is simple, easily understandable, and efficient website so that the teachers and students can access the time-table according to their convenience.
Traditionally, the system of managing a timetable was done manually by doing paper work. All the schedules of students/faculties and allocating subjects/classes/time had to be managed on paper. So if there were any changes to be made in the timetable it has to be replaced everywhere manually in the whole timetable making it messy and more difficult. There was lot of manpower needed in this process and consumed more time. Thus the manual work was more and more and the system was complex. Then desktops or laptops were used to generate timetables which were produced by making tables consisting of particular subjects/classes/time and faculties required. This reduced the use of paper but the manual work was yet to be improved. Whenever there was any change in the schedule of faculty/student or adding any new faculty/subject, it has to be changed manually every time which was time consuming.
In our proposed system, the work of manually adding the subjects, classes, faculties and time has been replaced by the use of automated timetable generation which will be produced by giving subjects, faculties and time as inputs and a timetable will be generated as its output. And whenever there will be any change in the schedule or there are any proxies the use of instant messaging provided in our project will help to solve the problems/clashes generated between students/classes thus saving time and manpower. This project tends to manage the time-table of the courses taught in the learning center of “Signal and telecommunication department” in N.E. Railways.
• Interface for input: the website will be having an easy to use and interactive interface to enter all the inputs required to form a time-table. • Database capabilities: the system will have well-designed database to store all the information which will be entered as input. • Search panels: the system will have an easy to use search panel to search the time-table and other required information conveniently.
The intended audience of the project comprises of any individual, be it a teacher or a student who needs the time-table in order to follow the schedule.
The system will be a website which will be available only on the server of Railway headquarter in Gorakhpur. This way only the teachers and the students who are registered in the training institute, will be able to access the time-table conveniently. The system uses the technologies like- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Bootstrap, and SQL. HTML provided the basic framework for the webpages. CSS was used for the styling and designing of the webpages. PHP and SQL were needed to allow the functionalities such as sessions, and allow database connectivity via XAMPP. Bootstrap was mainly used so as the website turns out to be fully responsive. So the project is all about Frontend as well as Backend Website Development.
1- HTML
Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) is the main mark-up language for creating webpages and other information that can be displayed in a web browser. HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags enclosed in angle brackets (like < html> ;), within the web page content. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like < h1> and </h1>, although some tags represent empty elements and so are unpaired, for example <img>. The first tag in a pair is the start tag, and the second tag is the end (they are also called opening tags and closing tags). In between these tags web designers can add text, further tags, comments and other types of text-based content.
2- CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a mark-up language. CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar mark-up language) from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colours, and fonts. This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for table less web design).
3- JavaScript
JavaScript (JS) is an interpreted computer programming language. It was originally implemented as part of web browsers so that client-side scripts could interact with the user, control the browser and alter the document content that was displayed. JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language with dynamic typing and has first-class functions. Its syntax was influenced by the language C. JavaScript copies many names and naming conventions from Java, but the two languages are otherwise unrelated and have very different semantics.
4- PHP
PHP was at first created as a simple scripting platform called “Personal Home Page”. Nowadays PHP is an alternative of the Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. PHP is an open source server-side language which is used for creating dynamic web pages. It can be embedded into HTML. It is usually used in conjunction with a MySQL database on Linux/UNIX web servers. It is probably the most popular scripting language. PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language and interpreter that is freely available. PHP is a scripting language, and can be used to create web pages written in HTML.
5- BOOTSTRAP
Bootstrap is a free and open-source front-end web framework for designing websites and web applications. It contains HTML- and CSS-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, navigation and other interface components, as well as optional JavaScript extensions. Unlike many web frameworks, it concerns itself with front-end development only. It is modular and consists of a series of less style sheets that implement the various components of the toolkit. These style sheets are generally compiled into a bundle and included in web pages, but individual components can included or removed. Bootstrap provides a number of configuration variables that control things such as colour and padding of various components.
6- XAMPP
XAMPP is a free and open-source cross-platform web server solution stack package developed by Apache Friends, consisting mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, Maria DB database interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages. Since most actual web server deployments use the same components as XAMPP, it makes transitioning from a local test server to a live server possible. We use it here to store time-table data in the database. The most obvious characteristic of XAMPP is the ease at which a WAMP webserver stack can be deployed and instantiated. Officially, XAMPP's designers intended it for use only as a development tool, to allow website designers and programmers to test their work on their own computers without any access to the Internet. To make this as easy as possible, many important security features are disabled by default. XAMPP has the ability to serve web pages on the World Wide Web. A special tool is provided to password-protect the most important parts of the package. XAMPP also provides support for creating and manipulating databases in Maria DB and SQLite among others.
Modules are the partitions of any project done to ease the task of development. Different modules are designed so that debugging and other development phase gets the easiest implementation. On a broad perspective the functionalities in the project are constrained depending on whether or not the user is a registered member with the website. Further, the user should also be logged in to enjoy the complete range of the features available.
The different pages of the system are: • Home Page • Login Page • Welcome Page • Admin Panel • Course Time-table page • Course Calendar • Learning Resources • Courses • Gallery
1- The Home Page:
The home page consists of different panels with the help of which other pages can be loaded and the information can be collected. The links include- course, resource, time-table information, gallery, course calendar, admin panel.
2- Course time-table:
This can be found using the link ‘timetable information’ on the home page. Using this, the students can gather information regarding the timetable which is to be followed during the duration for which they are enrolled. The faculties can access the timetable which will encapsulate only the courses they have to teach.
3- Course calendar:
This can be found using the link ‘course calendar’ on the home page. It consists of all the courses which will be taught in the signal and telecom learning centre while you are enrolled. The course calendar contains courses for the non-gazetted faculty of signal department and for the non-gazetted faculty of the telecom department as well.
4- Learning Resources:
It can be found using the link ‘resources’ on the home page of the website. It mainly consists of the signal engineering manual and the telecom manual of the courses taught. The signal resource consists of all the notes which are required in signal department along with the lab-sheets. The telecom resource consists of all the notes which are required in telecom department along with the lab-sheets.
5- Available courses:
This section can be found using the ‘courses’ link present on the home page of the website. It will get you redirected to the page which will provide information about all the courses which are available and will be taught during the term.
6- Admin Panel:
This can be found using the ‘admin panel’ on the home page of the website. Only the admin has an access to this page and he has to login in order to enter. After entering the page, the admin even has the access to change the data in every part of the website be it the timetable, the calendar, etc. Once you are in the admin panel, you have the power to change the data present in the database. You can add certain data from the database and you can even remove them. Modifying the data is also not a difficult task once you become the admin. Once you add, remove or modify the data, you don’t have to return to the home page for checking if it has actually been done. You can just click on the ‘click here to see the timetable’ button to see the modified timetable.
7- Gallery:
This section can be found using the ‘gallery’ link on the home page of the website. This page consists of the pictures of trains, the internal working, the external procedure and everything regarding the smooth working of the system used for the movement of trains.
The traditional system of managing a timetable manually by doing paper work is very complex and error-prone. Automation of the entire system improves the efficiency. It provides a friendly graphical user interface which proves to be better when compared with the existing system. It gives appropriate access to the authourised users depending on their permissions. It effectively overcomes the delay in communication and updating of information also becomes so easier. System security, data security and reliability are the striking features. The system has adequate scope for modification in future if it is necessary.
• We can shift the website from local Railway server to the Internet by the hosting the entire website on the cloud using AWS or Google Platform.
• We can design an Android App for the same purpose of Time Table Management System.
• We can also add the feature of Book Selling on this website for the trainees.
• We can do real time analysis of the student’s performance data.