Food truck project
Brandeis Senior Field project With City Of Boston
Food Truck Project
Brandeis University Senior Field Project With City Of Boston
Background
Boston food truck project
Status Quo
For this project, the team worked closely with the City of Boston to improve efficiency on processes related to food truck operations in Boston.
The City of Boston Food Initiatives oversees the operation of all food trucks vending in Boston. Up to the time of the project, most of the department's processes for food trucks had been done manually -- with over 80 food trucks and 330 shift slots per week, these procedures were time consuming and prone to error.
Stats
Key Numbers About City of Boston Food Truck Project
1
Annual Lottery for shifts allocation
80+
Food Truck Running
330+
Shifts Provided
1000+
Record Tracked Manually
Vision
Out take
We started the food truck project hoping to improve this situation by doing through research on related fields and provide technical solutions to the problem.
After research and analysis, we realized that the annual lottery should be the first process to be improved. The annual lottery, an annual shift reassignment process, was done by the city by having all truck owners coming to a meeting and manually determine the order of selection by drawing paper out of a hat. It is a lengthy process that takes 4 hours in total and its efficiency can be greatly enhanced.
Thus, our technical solution to this problem is a web system that automates the selection process that allows food truck owners to eventually participate in this process remotely and also reduce the time of the event.
Product
Brief summary of our solution
Structure
Crafted with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as front end, Java Servlet and PostgreSQL as back end and database, the client app dynamically displays and updates data in the backend database.
Through web socket on Tomcat 8, administrator app is able to control and communicate with client-side apps fluently.
Description
a brief description on the functions
*the registeration page of client app.
Client-side app
The client-side app used by food truck owners have two functions: display the current shifts chosen by the trucks for the first year and allow truck owners to choose shifts from available shifts.
Before their turn to choose shifts, truck owners would be waiting while checking their currently assigned shifts for the new calendar year. owners with multiple trucks can check schedules for different trucks by swiping left or right.
Clients will be notified one before and at the instance of their turn that their turn is close.
Administrator app
Administrator app allows the city administrators to start each round of selection process and output the final result from database to a calendar feed that allows future output to the city's website.
Source Code and demos
Copyright 2015