project-proposal-2025

Fuely - Fuel Savings Calcuator

Abstract

Australia has fantastic fuel price reporting API’s required by law, but alot of the existing apps for consumers are buggy, bloated with advertisements and are not really innovative when it comes to user functionaility. This is where Fuely enters. Fuely makes it much easier to save money when refueling your car.

Have you ever seen really cheap petrol thats 20km from your house and wondered if it’s really saving you money driving all the way over there? Fuely’s main quality of life feature is calculating this saving factor for you based on your car type, reported fuel efficency, weather condition and other scientific factors. Users are presented with several options including shortest difference, highest savings and overall best place to shop for fuel.

Author

Name: Max Taylor

Student number: 47496934

Functionality

The features that the software system should have are:

• User Accounts
  • Users signup to a free account and and select their car from a list
  • The user account collects basic information such as email, name and birthday for authentication purposes only.
  • The app maintains a database (from public car data) of all cars and their reported fuel efficencies (city, highway and average effiencies are all public data).
  • Also the app knows what fuel type they need for their car (but users can update this if they want a higher one).
• The Map Screen & Searching
  • This is the main interface that users interact with.
  • Users enter how much fuel they want to buy (or a dollar amount like most people would fill up to)
  • optional Users enter a destination they are driving to so the fuely can suggest a cheap petrol station on the way.
  • The map shows the users current location and has pins on the closest petrol stations.
  • Using google maps distance API the user is served the true distance (km) and time (min) that it would take for them to drive to any given petrol station.
  • Using our proprietary fuel cost calcuation which accounts for fuel burned in transit & weather like rain or cyclones the map tells you how much you would save driving their and decides the best option.
  • All fuel data is pulled from governement reporting API’s which are updated each day.
• Fuel Calculation Maths
  • This caluclation is a very important part of the apps functionaility.
  • It would use distance data from the google maps distance API.
  • It would find current weather data from a local weather API.
  • It would find current windspeed data and direction of wind from another API.
  • Combining all these factors it would calculate how much fuel will be burned on the drive.

Scope

The scope for the MVP of this system will include the features:

• User Accounts
  • Users can signup and report their cars’ fuel efficency
• The Map Screen & Searching
  • Users can enter amount of fuel required (L or $)
  • Map displays several close petrol stations that a user could choose
  • Google Maps Distance API displays the driving distance and time to drive for all options.
  • Fuel cost calculation determines the best option based on fuel burnt trying to get their and overall savings based on current price.
• Fuel Calculation Maths
  • Use distance data from the google maps distance API.
  • Calculate how much fuel will be burned on the drive.

    Quality Attributes

    Scalability

    Scalability is super important for a consumer tool like this one. As it is quite a cool gimmick, just spreading through word of mouth could increase userbase size dramatically and as such the project will need to scale on demand. Breaking it up into subsystems and services and containerising each will allow us to scale on demand and grow services that are being used more frequently on demand. It would negatively affect users if the application were to be slow and buggy due to scaling issues.

    Security

    Security is very important in a location data collecting application such as this. This application will collect important personal information such as what car you drive and where you drive it which is quite sensitive and could be detrimental if it where to be leaked or compromised. As such data secuirty must be considered at all points of developement and their must be rigorous testing to ensure the highest standard.

    Extensibility

    As there exists other fuel price applications who may want to implement similar features, it is important that this application is easy to extend with new features in order to stay relevant and cutting edge. It should be built in a modular way which allows for easy addition of other features, post launch, and constant updates to improve the quality of the application.

    Evaluation

    Scalability

    To evaluate the scaleability of the application, tests will need to be done when the application is at a low and higher loads. Tests need to check all functionaility as loads change in order to evaluate if the application is scaling correctly. This may also require checks on the containers that are being created to establish their health.

    Security

    To evaluate security the overall architecture and also the codebase needs to be scrutinised to ensure the highest level of data safety. This means that when designing this project, any features that work with the location and user data as well as the database design, need to keep security high on the list of design prinicples.

    Extensibility

    To evaulate extensibility, the architecture and design choices should allow an easily upgradable and expandable application which is comparmentalised in order to allow easy addition of features. Checks need to include breaking features into sub systems and microservices and ensuring overall compartmentalisation.