AUTOMATED RESOURCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR HOSTEL ALLOCATION

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.0 Introduction

In a bid to meet the challenges of teeming population in countries all over the world, government and private investors have come into the educational sector to establish institutions of higher learning. An integral part of the facilities made available in such institutions are hostel accommodation spaces for students to create an academic community which will help facilitate effective refinement and development of the students. However, most of these hostel facilities especially in institutions in developing countries are managed with conventional manual methods and this has been impacting negatively on the effective resource utilization and overall efficiency of these academic institutions. The manual method of managing and administering hostels in institutions is obviously not effective as it is attributed to the following challenges:

• Difficulties in record management - data redundancy, difficulty in data update; difficulty in data recovery; difficulties in generating information about those students who had left the hostel, vulnerability to manipulations/human error;
• Difficulty in tracking the history of a facility - a room or chalet or building;
• Registration for hostel allocation is done manually, thus over time, handling of the paper files becomes cumbersome and untidy as the population of student increases;
• The whole exercise is time-consuming and a waste of human and material resources.

The proposed system provides solution to the problems of traditional method of managing hostel facilities. The system attempts to improve institutions' hostel services for stakeholders - administrator, management and students of the hostel. It automates the administrative processes and reduces the stress associated with searching for information on a student/a facility in a bundle of registers. It is specially designed to centrally allocate and manage accommodation spaces in a typical student's hostel. The system user can store the data of those students who had left the hostel, and check the personal profile (retrieves from the database) of all the current students within few minutes. The students in the hostel will be recognized from the ID number allocated at the point of room allocation. This system automatically calculates all the bills and issues notifications.

The system has a unique approach to tracking information and report generation which is vital in data handling. This makes the proposed system more robust, more reliable and efficient. Entire gamut of the system comprises of several modules for room allocation, inventory management, time-tabling, transportation scheduling and other administrative activities. It can be well defined to track performance within the application of hostel accommodation system. The system uses one single central database to handle the complexity of student's hostels management and all administrative functions.