M-TICKET – Mobile Booking

Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION

Nowadays SMS or Short Messaging Service is a major communication alternative. Also, in this modern world all the facilities should be available at our fingertips whenever required, wherever we are. So we thought of developing the “SMS based movie ticket reservation”. The main purpose of our project named “M-TICKET – Mobile Booking” is to make the ticket reservation simple and easy.

In the counter based movie ticket reservation, the user has to go to the counter and stand in a queue to reserve the ticket which is time consuming. Also, in the Online reservation the user should have the internet facility. Compared with these systems of ticket reservations, our system makes the reservation easy and quick.

In this application, the user can use his cell phone to send SMS to reserve the movie tickets. Also, he can get the movie updates from time to time through his Cell Phone in the form of SMS.

We try to implement this concept in small way using SMS technology. Here we show how to access the movie information that is stored in the database and reserve the ticket just by sending an SMS from your cell phone to SMS server and get back the required information on your Cell Phone.

Chapter 2: SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION

2.1 Aim:

The aim of our project named “M-TICKET – Mobile Booking” is to develop a software which helps the user to reserve movie tickets just by sending an SMS. To access this software, the user need not load any application to his cell phone or he need not have internet facility. He needs to just send an SMS in a prescribed format to reserve the ticket.

2.2 Purpose:

The purpose of our project is to make ticket reservation simple and easy and to provide a cheaper way of reserving the ticket just by sending an SMS.

2.3 Scope:

This project will provide a simple way to reserve tickets. A user can reserve the tickets in two ways- SMS based reservation and counter based reservation. For the SMS based reservation the user has the facilities to register his mobile phone, reserve the tickets, request for movie updates, cancel the tickets and unregister his mobile number. The user will get an appropriate reply through SMS to his cell phone. The user can also come to the counter to reserve the tickets. The payment can be done either through credit card or in the counter.

2.4 User Characteristics:

A customer will be having the certain requirements that must be provided by the system. Hence at the initial stage of the software development, a requirement analysis is performed to identify the needs of the customer. Our software is movie ticket reservation software which can be used in any theatre. To make it applicable in any of the theatres, we have taken into consideration the following requirements:

• Theatre can have any number of screens.
• Each screen can have any number of classes.
• The price of the ticket is based on the class.
• Each class can have any number of rows.
• Each row can have any number of seats.
• Each screen can have certain number of shows per day.
• The screen can have different movies in different shows.
• Two different screens can have different movies running simultaneously.

There are two types of users of the system. One is the customer and the other is the administrator

The Customer should be able to

1. • Register with his username and credit card number (optional)
   • Reserve the ticket
   • Make payment either through credit card or through the counter
   • Cancel some or all the reserved tickets
   • Get the movie updates of the theatre
   • Unregister

The Administrator should be able to

1. • Register himself by giving his details along with the user name and password
   • Login into the system
   • Update his information
   • Change password
   • View seat status
   • Edit the screen, class, price, movie, seat, show time information etc.
   • Perform reservation, cancellation, payment operations in the counter
   • Delete the old records

The reservation can be done only for 2 days – today and tomorrow. After reserving the ticket, the payment must be done and the ticket must be collected before 45 minutes of the show. Otherwise the reserved tickets will be cancelled.

There are 2 modes of reservation:

1. Counter based reservation
2. SMS based reservation

In the counter based reservation, seats are reserved manually by the Administrator. The customer should come to the counter, and specify the movie, date of show, time of show, class and the number of seats required. Then the Admin will check the availability of seats. If the seats are available, then the reservation will be done and the reservation code will be given to the customer. The customer can also cancel some or all the reserved seats.

In the SMS based system, all the operations are done automatically by the system. The customer should first register himself through the SMS. A registered customer can reserve the seats, cancel the reserved seats, request for the movie updates of the theatre and unregister all by sending the SMS in the specified format.

Two payment options are available to the registered customer:

1. Credit card based payment
2. Counter payment
   When the reservation code is entered, the system should automatically show the amount of money needs to be paid.

2.5 Feasibility Study:

The process of analyzing the requirements of the system should always be preceded by the feasibility study of the system to be developed. It involves knowing what the system must achieve and whether these requirements can be satisfied with the current software and hardware technologies available.

The SMS based reservation software should provide the following basic features:

1. It must enable designing the user friendly front end.
2. It must provide means to connect to the database where the data is stored.
3. It should provide the means to transfer the messages between the cell phone and the computer system.
4. It should provide the means to process the message.

Considering all these needs, we can use Visual Basic.NET Framework to develop the front end and to process the message, MS-SQL Server to create the database, ADO objects to database connectivity and ATtention (AT) commands to transfer the messages between the cell phone and the computer.

Feasibility of the system:

2.6 Software Requirements:

• Operating system: Microsoft Windows XP
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
• SQL Server 2005

2.7 Hardware requirements:

• Processor Pentium 4
• RAM- 256Mb
• HDD-10GB
• USB cable
• Cell Phone

We will try to implement our project in a small way using SMS technology. Here we will show how to access the movie information stored in the database and reserve the ticket just by sending an SMS from your cell phone to SMS server and get back the required information on your Cell Phone. This application is implemented using VB.NET (Visual Basic .NET) as front end, MS-SQL Server as backend, ADO.NET for connectivity and the AT (ATtention) commands are used to transfer the messages from the cell phone to the computer through Comport.