IJSTE - International Journal of Science Technology & Engineering | Volume 3 | Issue 11 | May 2017

ISSN (online): 2349-784X

App-based Water Tanker Booking, Monitoring

& Controlling System
Mr. Kunal Tewatia Mr. Ayush Verma
Research Student Research Student
Department of Computer Engineering Department of Computer Engineering
College of Engineering, Bharati Vidyapeeth University, College of Engineering, Bharati Vidyapeeth University,
Pune, India Pune, India
Mr. Ariz Ansari Dr. Naveenkumar Jayakumar
Research Student Professor
Department of Computer Engineering Department of Computer Engineering
College of Engineering, Bharati Vidyapeeth University, College of Engineering, Bharati Vidyapeeth University,
Pune, India Pune, India

Abstract
This research reports on the need of an app based approach to improve teaching and learning of software engineering in large
groups. Scarcity of Drinking water has been a major issue over the years across the globe and various steps have been taken by the
concerned authorities all over the world to make drinking water readily available to everyone. Especially for a developing country
like India with a huge population, managing water resources becomes all the more important.Most of the states of India have been
suffering from water shortage over the years and Maharashtra is one of them. Recently, in April 2016, Latur suffered from one of
the heaviest water crisis in history due to deficient rainfall. Speaking of Pune district, as many as 96 villages in scarcity hit areas
asked for supply of water through tankers in June 2016. The district administration deployed 147 tankers in scarcity hit areas to
ensure daily supply of drinking water. About 3.14 lakh residents in 96 villages and about 837 waadis are still dependent on tankers
to meet their daily requirement of water. As of now, out of 13 talukas in Pune district administration has deployed tankers in 11
talukas.
Keywords: Water Scarcity, Tanker Allocation, Blocking Queue, Android application, Data Mining, Remote Procedure
Call
________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I. INTRODUCTION

With two-third of the planet’s surface covered by water and the human body consisting of a three-forth percent of it. This fact
provides Although significant effort is usually exerted in teaching at higher education institutions, the outcomes at the end may
not be in-line with the effort exerted at the first place. The aim of our project is to regulate and optimize the water supply through
tankers in the areas which need them the most and ensure that whenever a request is made, the nearest water tanker reaches to the
consumer in the shortest possible time.
The consumer's request the operating station for water tankers. A water tanker will be issued to a particular location only if the
combined water requirement of the consumers is according to a minimum value specified and this value depends on the population
density of the area making the request. The application at operating station will issue tanker-men the water requirement order and
the nearest tanker to the consumer will be allocated the request. The tanker reaches the consumer within the stipulated time which
is decided depending on the distance between the filling station and the consumer’s location.
From the above discussion, it is clear that Maharashtra has been suffering from Water shortage and crisis in the last few years
and it is very important to regulate the supply of Water Tankers. There is no well-defined application for this purpose. The aim of
this research is to build a digitalized solution to regulate the supply of water tankers, especially in the rural areas of Maharashtra.
The solution consists of an Android Application which will serve as the front–end and this Android Application will communicate
with a Java-based server. In this research, more emphasis has been laid on the design of server’s algorithm.
With this system, the efficiency of the water tank supply system can be largely enhanced.

II. LITERATURE SURVEY

As discussed above, Maharashtra has been facing water crisis continuously in the last 3 years and it has been the rural areas and
their Most of the states of India have been suffering from water shortage over the years and Maharashtra is one of them. Recently,
in April 2016, Latur suffered from one of the heaviest water crisis in history due to deficient rainfall. Speaking of Pune district, as
many as 96 villages in scarcity hit areas asked for supply of water through tankers in June 2016. The district administration
deployed 147 tankers in scarcity hit areas to ensure daily supply of drinking water. About 3.14 lakh residents in 96 villages and

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 App-based Water Tanker Booking, Monitoring & Controlling System
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about 837 waadis are still dependent on tankers to meet their daily requirement of water. As of now, out of 13 talukas in Pune
district administration has deployed tankers in 11 talukas.
In 2012, Maharashtra declared that the drought that hit Marathwada that year was the worst of them all. A deficit in rainfall
adversely affects agriculture resulting in poor output of crop, which in turn affects the financial condition of farmers. While
insufficient rainfall is a reason for drought, it’s not the only reason. Poor selection of crops, inefficient methods of irrigation and
imbalanced use of ground and stored water also lead to drought-now commonly known as ‘man-made drought’. Maharashtra has
been facing this man-made drought since 2012.
In 2011, the year preceding the drought, Maharashtra recorded an above-average rainfall and most of the dams were full (even
today, Maharshtra has the highest number of dams in the country). In 2013, with 3,712 major, minor and medium projects,
Maharashtra had the highest number of dams in the country exclusively for irrigation; yet its irrigation coverage was 17.9 percent
in 2009-10.

Fig. 1: List of Drought Affected areas (2015 - 16)

As the drinking water scarcity intensifies in the parched regions of Maharashtra, the number of tankers supply drinking water to
remote villages and hamlets increased by 12% within a week. The number of tankers taking care of drinking water needs this year
is thrice the number of tankers during comparable period of previous year.
According to the data with the state government, as on March 21, 3122 tankers were plying drinking water in the state, up 12%
as compared to 2779 a week ago on March 14. While, on March 23 last year, 990 tankers were ferrying drinking water to 717
villages.
Drinking water has become specifically scarce in Marathwada region, where many reservoirs have no live storage of water,
while water from the dead storage of big reservoirs like Ujani is taking care of water requirements of many villages in its command
area.
All the reservoirs in Maharashtra have only 24% usable water storage as on March 24 as compared to 39% on same day last
year.The figure in the graph bar shows that the available, demand and utilizable water supply ratio in India. As per increasing
population, the demand and utilization of water increases to great extent, but availability of water is decreasing day by day.If the
drought-like conditions increase, the water tankers could play an important role in bringing the conditions back to normal.

Fig. 2: Water Demand and Supply in India

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Table – 1
List of Drought-Affected Districts and Talukas.
Sr. No. of affected
District Names of Talukas
No. Talukas
Barshi, Karmala,Madha, Malshiras, Mangalvedha, Mohol, Pandharpur, Uttar Solapur,
1 Sholapur 11 (All)
Sangola, Dakshin Solapur, Akkalkot.
2 Sangli 7 Jat, Kavatemanhankal, Tasgaon, Miraj, Khanapur, Atpadi, Kadegaon.
3 Pune 5 Baramati, Daund, Indapur, Purandar, Shirur.
4 Satara 5 Maan, Khatav, Khandala, Phaltan, Koregaon
Sangamner, Kopargaon, Shrirampur, Akola, Pathardi, Parner, Shrigonda, Ahmednagar,
5 Ahmednagar 14 (All)
Rahata, Jamkhed, Shevgaon, Rahuri, Nevasa, Karjat
6 Nashik 6 Yevala, Sinner, Nandgaon, Chandvad, Devla, Malegaon.
7 Beed 7 Parli, Kaij, Ashti, Patoda, Beed, Shirur, Wadvani.
8 Osmanabad 8 (All) Osmanabad, Tuljapur, Umarga, Lohara, Kalamb.
9 Aurangabad 2 Vaijapur, Gangapur.
10 Latur 4 Latur, Renapur, Ausa, Nilanga.
11 Jalna 2 Ambad, Ghansavangi.

III. PROPOSED SOLUTION

The aim of our project is to regulate and optimize the water supply through tankers in the areas which need them the most and
ensure that whenever a request is made, the nearest water tanker reaches to the consumer in the shortest possible time. The
consumer's request the operating station for water tankers.
A water tanker will be issued to a particular location only if the combined water requirement of the consumers is according to a
minimum value specified and this value depends on the population density of the area making the request.
The application at operating station will issue tanker-men the water requirement order and the nearest tanker to the consumer
will be allocated the request. The tanker reaches the consumer within the stipulated time which is decided depending on the distance
between the filling station and the consumer’s location.
The users can give a feedback about the service on the app. If not satisfied with the service, consumers can lodge a complaint
against the tanker man on the same app under the complaints section.

Software Design
The overall solution will be designed using Android Studio/Eclipse IDE and a database application and will consist of the
following:
 A user-side Android application
 A server-side Application designed in Java
 A Tanker-Men Android application

The user-side Android Application

The user side application will help a citizen to book a water tanker without any kind of difficulties. The user needs to register in
the application by providing name, mobile phone, password and age.
The verification of the user is done through the mobile number entered by the user and an OTP/ verification message is sent to
that mobile number.
Once the user is registered, the credentials are stored in the server database and can be fetched for Login process.

Fig. 3: User Login Interface

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When the user is logged in, device asks to fetch the location and once allowed, the current location of the user is displayed on
the screen using Google maps API.

Below it, a request button is present using which the user can make request for a water tanker. After requesting, user is asked
for the amount of water required (in liters).The user is summarized with the details of the request and is asked to confirm the
request. As the confirmation is done, the request reaches the server along with data of the user (location, request_id) and from the
server it is assigned to a tanker-man nearby the locality of the user.
A server-side Application designed in Java
As stated earlier, the solution consists of a Java-based server which will automate the allocation of Water tankers.
For building the solution, the concept of Blocking Queue is used. A blocking queue is a queue which blocks when you try to
dequeue from it when the queue is empty, or when you try to enqueue items to it and the queue is already full. A thread that tries
to enqueue an item in a full queue is blocked until some other thread makes space in the queue, either by dequeuing one or more
items or clearing the queue completely. Similarly, a thread that tries to dequeue an item in an empty queue is blocked until some
other thread inserts an item into the queue. Java version 5 and onwards comes with blocking queue implementations in the
java.util.concurrent package.
A database of all the Tankers responsible for delivering water to a particular location is maintained. This database contains the
Tanker Id, Tanker’s availability (Available or Not Available) and the Tanker status (Free or Not Free). It should be noted here that
if a Tanker’s status is ‘Not Available’, it means that probably there is some problem with that Tanker and it will not be able to
deliver water for an indefinite period of time. However, if a Tanker’s status is ‘Not Free’, it means that at the moment it is busy in
processing some other request and it will be free after processing of the current request is complete.
The entire information about the Tankers is fetched from the Tankers database and is stored in an Allocation Queue. Initially,
the status of all tankers is ‘Free’ by default. If a tanker is not capable of delivering water at a particular time or on a particular day,
the Tanker-men informs the concerned authorities about the unavailability of the Tanker along with the reason for unavailability
and once the reason for unavailability is approved, the status of the tanker is changed to ‘Not Available’ in the Tankers database.
Whenever water has to be delivered to a particular location, the information about the location, i.e. its Latitude and Longitude, is
fetched from a Location database and is stored in a Request Queue. This data in the Location database comes from a GPS Module
installed at the locations where water has to be delivered. This GPS module returns the exact Latitude and Longitude of the location
to the database. Along with the Location details, the exact time at which water has to be delivered is also stored in the Request
Queue.
Some backup tankers are available in case the availability status of one or more tankers is ‘Not Available’ and the information
about these backup tankers is also stored in the Allocation Queue. The number of backup tankers varies from region to region
depending upon the population density of the area.
The mechanism of the communication of server with the GPS Module mentioned above can be explained through the concept
of Remote Procedure Call (RPC) - the server has stored routines to fetch data from the GPS module and store it in the Location
database. These routines are executed on the GPS Module and the results are returned back to the server.
If the Request queue is already full, no new data is stored in it until a thread removes (dequeues) one or more elements from the
queue. Whenever one or more elements come in the Request Queue, they are processed in accordance with the First in First out
(FIFO) rule of the queue data structure.
For processing, data is fetched from the Request Queue and as soon as data is fetched successfully, a thread stops the Request
Queue. As soon as the Request Queue is stopped, Allocation Queue is started and the Allocation Queue is traversed from front of

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the queue to the rear of the queue and the first Tanker which has a status of ‘Available’ and ‘Free’ is allocated to that particular
request.
As soon as a tanker is allocated from the Allocation queue, the status of that Tanker changes to ‘Not Free’ in the database. If the
status of all the tankers is ‘Not Free’, it means none of the tankers is available at the moment and the Request will have to wait for
some time in order to get processed. If the status of one or more tankers is ‘Not Available’, the backup tankers come to operation
immediately.
As soon as the Allocation Queue completes the processing of a request (data from Request Queue), it is stopped and the data
from the Request Queue and the Allocation Queue (for that particular request) is combined and a third database table is prepared
which contains information from the Request Queue (Latitude, Longitude and the Delivery Time) and the Allocation Queue
(Tanker Id). New Records are added to this table as soon as a Tanker is allocated for a particular request and as soon as a new
record is found in this table, its refection is found in the Android App. which shows the request made and the Tanker with a
particular Tanker Id that has been allocated to it.
This whole process from fetching a request to preparing a third database table and displaying data on the Android App. about
the tanker allocated for a request coming from a particular Latitude and Longitude continues until the Request Queue is empty,
i.e. there are no unprocessed requests.
The Tanker-men Android Application
Install this app on the Tankerman’s smart device. The driver will be guided through the steps and notified when it is all set to drive.
The app offers the latest features that help you focus on driving. It will explain how to use the application and will provide
optional navigation.Every trip is fully tracked by GPS for safety and security.
This app typically uses 1-2 GB of data per month.
The tankerman application will help to navigate the tankerman to the requested destination with proper navigation and guidance
throughout, without any kind of difficulties. The tankerman needs to register in the application by providing name, mobile phone,
password and email .
The verification of the tankerman is done through the mobile number entered by the tankerman and an OTP/ verification message
is sent to that mobile number.
Once the registration is complete, the credentials are stored in the server database and can be fetched for Login process.

IV. CONCLUSION

This paper presents an overview of and examines the issues caused by water shortage in Maharashtra and the advantages which
Water Tankers can bring in such situations. Industrialization and urbanization during the past three decades has resulted in quality
induced water shortage problems throughout this state.
The government intended to introduce capital into water sector and thus resolve the problems of capital shortage, low efficiency,
and increasing demand for water. As our study shows, however the water reform does not solve the existing problems of low water
quality, poor service, low efficiency, and corruption. In fact, it introduces new problems such as high water tariffs and the
termination of staff.
As the state is expected to reel under a water crisis in the days ahead, water tankers are bound to play an important role in
managing water resources especially in crisis situation.
Water tankers have grown in importance in the previous years and with the advent of technology, it will be advantageous to
digitalize the Water Tanker system. Thus, the concerned authorities will find it easier to manage the water supply according to the
demands of the user. Also, the users will find it comfortable to order a water tanker according to their needs.
The efficiency and ease of use of water tankers can be increased to a great extent by using this application.

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