Development of a location-based taxi service : using open-source tools

Sammanfattning: The aim of this project is to develop a component able to retrieve taxi providers in Sweden, based on input of coordinates and a search radius. The result should be available in a well-structured and accessible way through an RESTful web service. The study is conducted based on a customer inquiry stating that the component should be built using open-source tools and be developed in such a way that allows the component, or parts of the component, to be integrated in a larger system. Therefore, a preliminary study was conducted in order to find suitable open-source tools that are able to solve the specific customer requirements. The component uses an ad hoc company search engine to retrieve the taxi providers, contact information and coordinates. Additional information needed for determining the correctness of the taxi providers are retrieved from external resources and a filtering process is then performed before they are saved in persistent store. The project is successful in solving the main purpose and most of the customer requirements, while the RESTful service is unable too fully meet the requirement stating that the component should be able to handle multiple concurrent clients while still maintain responsiveness. This, is mainly due to the decision not to use an ad hoc framework in handling geospatial data structures and calculations and was a trade-off to ensure re-usability and integration of the component in a larger system.