Assignment Sun Wukong (SW) is a new taxi-style service that delivers customers to and from Melbourne Airport. Rather than working on pre-fixed rates based on distance and time, SW sets fees based on...

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Table of Contents
Question 1    2
Question 2    6
References    10
Question 1
Operations
The Sun Wukong or SW offers a new type of taxi-booking process for the people who are travelling to or from the Melbourne airport. It is aimed at cutting down the time required to get a taxi and a quote from a driver. It will save the time of the passengers and the drivers. At the same time, safety and security of the passengers is another concern. SW is interested to use cutting edge technologies to develop an online application that will use GPS tracking system to locate passengers and drivers and then helping them to negotiate the taxi fare and have a ride. A passenger needs to put the detailed requirements like destination, distance, route, preferences etc. while booking a ride. Then the requirements will be sent to the registered and verified drivers nearby. The drivers who are interested in grabbing the booking, will share their quotes to the passenger. The passenger will get the quotes and an estimation by the system on how much the fare should be. The passenger can easily compare the both to decide the most suitable quote. And once the passenger selects a quote. The taxi will be booked and the quote will be locked. Then the journey will be started and it will stop when the GPS will determine that the passenger has arrived at the destination.
SW has also decided to implement some loyalty rewards points based system and a rating system to encourage the quality assurance and following the guidelines. The drivers and the passengers both will be able to rate each other after a ride.
The passengers must pay online using credit and debit cards. Alternatively they can purchase gift cards from Eleven-seven Stores and use the same for payment.
To ensure safety and security of the passengers, the SW will perform the background check and will test the skillset of the drivers. It will help to ensure whether the driver is able to work with the mobile application based taxi service and whether the driver has any criminal records in past or not.
Assumptions
It is assumed that passengers will either go to the airport or will hire the taxies reach their destinations from the Melbourne airport only. The app will work for the taxis only and no other transportation or vehicles will be covered by the application. It is also assumed that the application will work for the Melbourne airport only.
Technology Requirements
Information and communication technologies are the primary building blocks of the proposed taxi booking application. The requirements are (Obaidat & Nicopolitidis, 2016),
· The application must be deployed on a distributed computing platform that can be accessed through the Internet.
· The front end interfaces for the drivers and the passengers will be different. Each of them needs to fill various forms to interact with the system.
· The backend system must have a suitable data warehouse to store, organize, and analyze data.
· The system must have integrated GPS navigation sub system to track the locations in real time.
· It will require analytical tools to support the data processing tasks involving in the business operations to estimate fare, tracking passengers, allowing communication between drivers and passengers and so on.
Recommendations
Based on the operations, assumptions, and technological requirements, following recommendations have been proposed to the SW to improve the operations and making it more competitive and robust.
· It is recommended that the system should be deployed on a suitable cloud computing infrastructure. The SaaS or Software-as-a-Service layer will be there to deploy the front-end to connect the mobile app interface and the web interface to the customers. The designs and functionalities of both of the versions of the application should be alike and consistent. However, the controls may differ. For example, the controls...