International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 5, Issue 2, February-2014

ISSN 2229-5518

502

Automation of Attendances in Classrooms using

RFID

Hassanin M. Al-Barhamtoshy, Abdulrahman H. Altalhi and Abdulfattah S. Mashat Information Technology Department, King Abdulaziz University (KAU) Saudi Arabia, P.O. 80221, 21589 Jeddah

hassanin@kau.edu.sa , ahaltalhi@kau.edu.sa, and asmashat@kau.edu.sa

Abstract— This paper automates the design and implementation of students’ attendance management system, taken into consideration easy access and time saving. The system will be used in faculty of computing and information system (FCIT) at King Abdulaziz University (KAU). Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and wireless technology are two technologies which will be applied as infrastructure in the indoor environment. University Based Services (UBS) and tag IDs of the RFID are being used in this paper, in order to determine the attendance list for academic staff. Once the academic staff enters a classroom, he will be able to register student’s presence. Therefore, an academic system for identifying and tracking attendance at computing college at KAU will be described, and hybrid RFID and Wireless LAN (WLAN) technologies will be implemented in FCIT academic environment.

Index Terms—Attendance, Classrooms, RFID Technology, Tags and Readers.

1 INTRODUCTION

——————————  ——————————
HE internet applications are widely used, due to the suc- cess of mobile technology, wireless networking, and loca- tion-based portable devices. Within the new generation of
pervasive and ubiquitous computing devices, two research topics are challenging: real-time localization and mobility so- lutions [1].
The localization problem has defined to know where ob- jects are, and therefore many Location Based Service (LBS) are being initiated. Consequently, network planning, such as mo- bility management, load balancing and network functionality are very useful in location based services.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 dis-
cusses related and previous work. Section 3 describes the mo-
tivation of the current paper. Section 4 presents modeling re-
quirements and the system architecture. Details of designing
and automation will be discussed such as; functional require-
ments, entities of lectures, time attendance, implementing at- tendance registration, testing and results. Section 5 summariz-
es and concludes results and future work.

2 RELATED WORKS

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is applied in many locations, like in museum services [2], [3], [4]. Muse- um services, museum security and visitors, tracking systems have been presented in Korea [2] , [ 3]. Other works illustrated in several academic and educational related services [5], [6], [7] to support attendance, tracking and monitoring at universi- ty, using NFC and RFID. Also, an automation of contactless university examination system is implemented to elaborate the business use case of the attendance monitoring system [8]. Additional papers focus on implementing and using RFID, Bio-metric, Fingerprint and GSM modem in attendance man- agement, and industrial applications [9] , [10]. The paper of [11] proposed a participant managerial prototype system by
using user IDs (SNS ID) in actual event site. Therefore, such paper presented a method to use NFC to connect online SNS IDs and online meetings in actual meeting rooms.
Many location objects in outdoor environments have been addressed and created; technologies have been studied, such as Global Positioning System (GPS) [12]. Using RFID technol- ogy, the tags can be embedded in small packages, and each tag can store a serial number for every product [13]. The RFID tags can be read as long as they are within the domain of a reader device [14].
RFID is used in many researches, developments, and appli- cations that attempt to take maximum advantage of such technology [15],[16],[17],[18],[19,[20]. Therefore, RFID technol- ogy is widely used in commercial, governmental sector and personal applications as demonstrated in [15-17]. RFID tech- nology is often used for object tracking in business and manu- facturing applications, such as in supply chain control [15], tracking management [16], [20], indoor location-based [21], [22], [23] and baggage transportation.
Our current research goal of the presented paper at FCIT is to provide RFID and Near Field Communication (NFC) tech- nologies for measuring the student attendances, participations and monitoring in academic teaching inside classrooms. How- ever, manual attendance process during lecture time con- sumed valuable time and hard maintenance task. Additional and miscellaneous applications include: electronic surveil- lance, protection of valuable equipments against theft, con- trolled access to vehicles, Electronic Road-Pricing (ERP) sys- tems, controlled access of personnel to secure or hazardous locations, time keeping systems, animal and automatic identi- fication of tools, identification of product variants and process control in flexible manufacturing systems.

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3 MODELING REQUIREMENTS AND SYSTEM STRUCTURE

An overview of the fundamental requirements of the attend- ance system will be described in this section. Two main objec- tives will be taken into consideration. The first objective is to build a reliable system to access students’ data of computing faculty via ODUS at KAU server. Detailed information about the ODUS can be found at http://odus.kau.edu.sa. The se- cond objective is to monitor and report students’ attendance percentage in each class.

3.1 Functional Requirements

Faculty of computing and information system holds more than 900 (nine hundred) students for males and more than 800 (eight hundred) students for females sections. There are three departments; Computer Science (CS), Information System (IS), and Information Technology (IT). Each department has equal number of students as the others. The faculty of computing contains 15 classrooms and labs; each class can hold up to 40 students. At the beginning of the day, 13 lectures can be held at the same time. Therefore, to meet this requirement, an aver- age attendance registration process should consume less than
2 seconds. Furthermore, the attendance system should provide an efficient service way for communicating with On-Demand University Service (ODUS) or ODUS+ (the new version of ODUS that contains all the KAU academic services). Such ser- vice will be used by the academic staff for aiding attendance registration process, and helping the student to examine his/her exam results in the future. Therefore, it is necessary to provide an easy way to take attendance. So, the automation of attendance and monitoring system should present high ro- bustness and reliability.

3.2 Entities of Lectures

The entities of each lecture consist of students within the classroom, that is, the academic staff member can attend. The academic staff member may be male or female, and such member is selected through the academic boarding at each department.
Let C be a classroom assigned by the academic student af- fairs, let the computing faculty includes several classrooms (15 classes in our case); c1, c2 … ci; therefore:
to register students’ attendance. This event procedure requires two methodologies; automatically or manually through the academic staff by (clicking attendance button). Therefore, the attendance registration proceeds as follows: (1) manually by academic staff and (2) automatically by the system.
This article will design and implement the attendance solu- tion. The solution is based on RFID technology, its different components and its related methods of operations. The stu- dent card should be tagged with RFID tag. RFID reader will be installed in each classroom, and all the readers are connected to the staffs’ LAN. At last, a computerized academic system will automate the attendance recording of the students.

When the academic staff enters a classroom, he will be able to take student’s attendance. The reader gives a sound when the system successfully finishes reading all the students’ tags in the classroom. Therefore, the RFID reader sends a complete attendance list to the server. Figure 1 shows the system archi- tecture.

C = { c1, c2…ci } , where ci C

(1)

Fig. 1. System Architecture [7]

Each class has program of lectures and academic staff as meta-data, such as staff name, department name, date and time of lectures.
Each department has group of lectures, let Ljk be an element in the set of all lectures L; where j represents department name
and k represents the lecture number for that class. Conse- quently, the set of lectures at room (Ci) is a subset of L and is written as Ljk.
The solution consists of three category layers. The first layer consists of various RFID readers installed in the different classrooms and practical labs of faculty building. The second layer includes middleware as a communication bridge be- tween the first layer and third layer by using the wireless LAN (WLAN) of the computing faculty. The third layer contains RFID server with the academic database to record the attend-

Ljk = { (l11, …l1k ), (l21, …l2k ), (l31, …l3k)}

(2)
ance of students, in addition to the ODUS application that
Ljk represents the three departments; computer science (CS), information system (IS), and information technology (IT).

3.3 Time of Attendance Registration

At each classroom, an event should be taken at specific time
supports all the academic services in KAU.
Therefore, the RFID database servers are connected to the
WLAN; one at FCIT (building 31) and another at building 125,
to manage and establish communication between different
readers and handle received data from these readers. Once the
RFID server receives the data from the reader, it inserts a new

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record of attendance in the RFID database server according to that reader (classroom is known with course at scheduled time).
The RFID database server stores the academic attendance of students. Such attendance data includes student Ids, course Id, staff Id, date/time, and the reader Id (that carried out the reading). Also, the RFID database server stores all readers’ information and readers settings (IP address, port no., class- room no., and building no.).
The database server is used to collect the attendance data from all the faculties and generate attendance report for uni- versity manager, staff and student. Such data is collected peri- odically at the end of day. The database server is used to store attendance data for the whole semester. Therefore, such server generates attendance report for every student and also for eve- ry section, staff and course. Consequently, by analyzing such reports with respect to other evaluation of staffs and students, the decision maker can decide strategic actions.
The ODUS or ODUS+ is running on separate server, and therefore it is independent of the readers. The student data- base management system of the college includes all the data related to students, subjects or courses, staffs, building, class- rooms, and time scheduling of each course.

3.4 System Implementation

The automation of the FCIT attendance will be presented in this section. The academic attendance software has been inte- grated into the client(s) device, as well as into the server de- vice. Therefore, all the requirements were standard in wireless communication (TCP/IP), reasonable reading range, and fast identification time for the RFID reader.
The automated system uses a reader (RFID tag reader) and so, the software toolkit is used to derive the planned equipments. The system can access all the required infor- mation through the ODUS database at KAU (student, staff, administrator, parking, etc.). RFID’s SDK supplies built-in functions to communicate with readers and collect data when any events have taken place. The following steps describe RFID features and event handling:
1. “Reader data” is initiated as an instance of RFID class.
2. “IP address” will be handled using set and get methods.
3. Reader’s port number and location can be recognized using
get and set methods. So, antenna can be specified and the
system will know which antenna is being used.
4. “Tag List” of students’ attendance is represented as array
of tag information.
5. “Discovery Time” represents time of tag found using read
and writes methods.
The database defines and establishes the data of students,
staffs, and administrator. Therefore, the system has the follow-
ing functions:
1. Add method is used (via administrator) to add reader for
each classroom by choosing building number, class num- bers, the IP address and Gateway. Also, delete/update
methods can be used to amend any updated information.
2. Show/Display students’ attendance by course subject,
classroom, department, or building.
3. Save/Store the students records in the academic database per course subject, classroom, department, or building. Consequently, security is a very important issue which

should be considered. So, the students’ tagged card ID can be renewed every year [6], [7], [23]. The automation system was made in the college of Computing and Information Technolo- gy at KAU, male building 31 and the new implementation is related to building 125. The physical building of the new RFID readers and WLAN are shown in the floor plan diagram (Fig- ure 2). There are nine locations for RFID readers at each floor, and many locations to cover the Wireless LAN (building 125).

Fig. 2 Deployment of the RFID System

3.5 Attendance Registration Methodology

As we said in the previous section, the academic registra- tion is classified into manual and automatic registrations. The common difference between the two methods is the usability of student identification card, with embedded student tag. Figure 3 illustrates the academic attendance system workflow as sequence diagram. Accordingly, assuming that, all the stu- dents of the meeting have student’s card with embedded tags. The deanship of registration and admission (DRA) at KAU prepares the student identification card with the RFID and NFC tags assigned with student information. The students’ tags information is stored in ODUS database. The students fill and prepare their courses and register their academic schedule of courses they are needed to study. Such students attend the meeting with their ID cards at a scheduled classroom that has a wireless reader.
Figure 4 shows the workflow of academic attendance as a
sequence diagram. On this scenario, the academic staff takes
the attendance process that will be considered automatic or
manual at specific lecture’s time. Consequently, students’ IDs
within the class can be registered and sent to the ODUS data-
base, with the related students meta data {< Ci , Li > }. There- fore, the academic staff application sends a message to the
ODUS database server telling that the student is in the class- room, and so, the attendance process takes place.

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Fig. 3 Deployment of the RFID System

Fig. 4 Workflow of Academic Registration (After Attendance Process)

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4 SYSTEM TESTING AND RESULTS

The system is tested according to the following scenario. The scenario was to install RFID reader(s) in classrooms for the three departments. All departments are connected to the faculty’s WLAN, the RFID server and the ODUS academic application; therefore a group of RFID students’ tags are em- ployed. The software system is implemented using C # to ma- nipulate the ODUS system added to register new student data, using direct connection to the SQL database. First step to run the system, a login page is displayed to authorize the academ- ic staff to access the system. Attendance recording will be started to provide “course information”, staff member, and students’ course registrations. Therefore, any absent student can be recognized. A sample of the system attendance will be tested, Figure 5 shows a screen shot of students’ attendance triggering for courses. The main screen of the system includes: instructor, student, Information technology deanship, admis- sion and registration deanship, and exit buttons (Figure 5-a). If the “Instructor” button is selected, the login screen will be displayed (Figure 5-b).
modify or print attendance. In case of selecting “Attendance

Check”; the following screen will be displayed, (Figure 6).

Fig. 6 Students’ Attendance Trigger

The final report of the system provides an attendance in- formation sheet, as shown in Figure 7. It includes the course title, instructor name, Student Ids, lectures arranged over the semester, and percentage of presence and absence.

Fig. 7 Students’ Attendance Sheet [7]

Fig. 5-a. Main Screen of the System

Fig. 5-b. Login Screen for the Instructor

Fig. 5 Students’ Attendance System

The instructor services can be categorized to check,

5 FORMAL DEFINITION FOR EVALUATION

The automated attendance is based on rules to detect at- tendance of students’ events and process them using the aca- demic services provided by ODUS. The formal definition of such events is similar to the definition in [23].
Definition 1: Student event- is a set of attendance events, as the following description: (Student Id, Location, Time, Stu- dent Info <Student. Level, Courses … >).
Definition 2: Academic Staff event- is a sequence of defined
staff information events, settled by the deanship of DAR,
as follows: (Staff Id, Location, Time, Staff Info <Name.
Title, Courses … >).
Definition 3: Mapping event- is used to map between staffs
and students events, based on the academic regularity rules of the FCIT.
The three definition rules can be defined according to the fol- lowing operations:

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1. Any Event ϵ Student Event (SE);
2. Any Event ϵ Academic Staff Event (AE); and
3. Any Event ϵ Mapping Event (ME)

4. If Mapping Event (SE , AE) Then attendance should

take place; i.e.; ME →SE and AE
5. Student Events: S1, S2, .. SN.
6. Academic Staff Events: AS1, AS2, .. ASM.
7. Constraints: Si .ID → ASj.ID and Si .Location →
ASj.Location and Si .Time → ASj.Time
8. Rule If Event (E) and constraints Then Response ac-
tion.
To prove the effectiveness of the solution, figure 8-(a) and 8- (b) differentiate the performance of traditional solution with the automated attendance solution.
Total Time = No of weeks x No of lectures per week x Dura- tion of Lecture (minutes) … (3)
According to formula (3), we have two categories of lectures;
according to the following two formulas:
Total Time 3 lecture per week = No of weeks x 3 x 50 (minutes)
………………………… (4)
Total Time 2 lecture per week = No of weeks x 2 x 80 (minutes)
………………………… (5)

Table (1) illustrates such calculations in case of the

two modes of lectures: three lectures in week and two lectures in week, taken into consideration the duration of the semester (15, 14, or 13 weeks).

TABLE 1. RELATION BETWEEN TOTAL CREDIT TIME AND WASTED TIME FOR COURSES (3 and 2 days per week)

Courses

Total Time

(Minutes)

15 14 13

Wasted Time

(Minutes)

15 14 13

3 Times per

Weeks

Week

2 Times per

Week

2250 2100 1950 225 210 195 10

2400 2240 2080 150 140 130 16

Fig. 8-a Attendance Response Time

Fig. 8-b Attendance Response Time

Figure 8 illustrates that when the number of students in the attendance increases, the response time of the traditional solution rises much more quickly than that with automated system.
The system reflects a positive feedback of academic saving and studying times. The feedback is performed according to the calculated saved time. The calculated time formula is as follows:

While, the total wasted time can be calculated by equation (6):

Total Wasted Time = No of weeks x No of lectures per week

x 5 (minutes) ……………………… (6)

In faculty of computing, FCIT College, each class consists of 25-30 students for each instructor (academic staff). There- fore, to take students’ attendance, each class takes between 4-5 minutes, the total spent time during semester (15 weeks with 3 credit hours) = 15 x 3 x 5 = 225 minutes = 3.75 hours (wasted time). Also, to calculate the total academic study time for each class in case of 3 lectures per week = 15 x 3 x 50 = 2250 minutes
= 37.50 hours. Figure 9 illustrates the relation between total
semester time and the wasted semester time in minutes.

Fig. 9 Relation between Total Semester Time and Wasted Se- mester Time in Minutes

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The total score of the saved time is expressed by the fol- lowing formula (7):

Score Saved Time = ∑N Time Penalty (Course (WN))

……………………… (7)

Where N represents the number of courses in academic semes- ter and w is the weight of the academic hours (2, or 3 lectures per week). Time penalty represents the saved time (function of wasted time) as shown in figure 10.

Fig. 10 Saved Time Penalty in Percentage (%)

The total relative penalty formula is as the following equation
(8):
Penalty (Course i) = Score Saved Time i /
∑ Score Saved Time (8)
To calculate relative error, between the two methodolo-
gies of the two categories of study (3 or 2 lectures per week),
the following absolute deviation is used, as shown in the two formulas (9 and 10):
Δ T = True value - Measured value = T - To; so,
Δ T3 Times per Week = 50 -5 = 45 Minutes (9)
Δ T2 Times per Week = 80 -5 = 75 Minutes (10)
Therefore, the relative error between the two categories =
45/75 % = 60 % improvement.

6. CONCLUSION

This paper introduced the design and implementation of academic attendance in classrooms using indoor localization of the RFID and WLAN network in faculty of computing- at KAU. Although, interconnected network of the RFID readers with academic attendance have been demonstrated, a generic middleware component is created, and it can be easily in- stalled in other classrooms within the same faculty or in other institutes. Such paper presented a pilot system. It was found that it reduces wasted time, human effort as man power, min- imizes cost of printing, and eases the academic attendance procedures. Consequently, the system has low cost, flexible design, easy to install, control and monitor. The system can be used for other domains such as payment, animal tagging, postal tracking, airline baggage reconciliation, road toll man- agement, control tracking and manufacturing systems.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Authors are thankful to King Abdulaziz University (KAU), Jeddah, through their grant’s number 14-01-429. Their financial support during the period of this re- search took place is greatly acknowledged.

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