Enhancing the Transportation of Students with Disabilities on Campus

Abstract

Access to education has always been aconstitutional right provided by countries to their citizens. To fosterinclusion and equality, many countries have made tangible efforts recently toinclude students with disabilities in mainstream education. A recentministerial resolution by the UAE government directs education institutions tocater to the needs of students with disabilities. Moving comfortably, andefficiently on campus is a basic need for students to attend lectures, labsessions, and social activities in different buildings. However, this basicneed forms another major challenge for students with disabilities. Thischallenge is usually aggravated in gated campuses where private cars are notallowed. In such situations, students with disabilities rely on the specialtransportation service provided by the education institution to move on campus.However, this service is ad-hoc in nature and requires students to communicatewith the service center to book the service in advance. The service booking isdone manually, which reduces the utilization of the available vehicles, andincreases the students' waiting time and the possibility that the booking isrejected. This paper introduces a mobile application with an intelligentbooking system to automate the booking requests. The aim of the system isreducing the students' wait time and booking rejection rate while maximizingthe utilization of the available vehicles.