An Intelligent Automated Attendance Data Management System Based On Case Based Authentication

Abstract

Attendance is a state in which a person is present in the field. An attendance management system is used to administer the attendance-recording process. There have been many systems proposed and implemented to replace manual methods of attendance recording with current trends shifting to NFC, RFID and biometric technology-based approaches. In this research paper, recent approaches implemented in attendance management systems will be explored and comparatively study its authentication aspect. Furthermore, As attendance present a variety of cases, we emphasize on multiple level authentication based on case-based reasoning. In the research, elements are selected from the multiple approaches available and incorporated into the new system framework. A new framework of attendance system was constructed to cater to different situations and the proposed system gains advantage from minimizing administrator user intervention in the system and provide flexibility in cases of attendance authentication. The proposed system presents limitations whereby usage of the system requires Internet connectivity and needs configuration if devices used together with NFC cards are other than smartphone. The results in this paper contributes to a prototype that simulates the functionalities included for detecting authentication from case-based situations. This research paper evaluated the proposed system’s functionalities in comparison to the existing systems. Overall, the evaluation of the prototype in terms of fulfilment of its user requirements has shown that this system has an overall high fulfilment of functionalities achieved.

Keywords: Attendance authenticationcase-basedautomationdata processingmobile

Introduction

The excessive absenteeism by students can drastically hinder the academic achievement of students. Absenteeism has been a common issue and many actions and alternatives have been taken to overcome this problem. Taking attendance is also important as a criterion for any assessment in an academic institution. Therefore, almost every institution or organization has made attendance mandatory as part of their policy. To avoid the possibility of being barred from examination for students, they would need to meet up a certain level of attendance set by their institutions.

The traditional way of taking attendance in most academic institutions are signing their names in the attendance sheet. This method is not only tedious in handling a large number of people and data, but it is also risky in keeping private information safe. For students, a proper attendance recording system can prevent proxy attendance and keep track of attendance performance. Hence, having an automated attendance management system is important for monitoring the attendance progress and preventing such problems mentioned. There are many approaches introduced by various researches over the years. Among those findings, the currently existing systems are largely implemented with NFC, RFID and biometrics technology into the system ( Saparkhojayev, Dauitbayeva, Nurtayev, & Baimenshina, 2014; Arulogun, Olatunbosun, Fakolujo, & Olaniyi, 2013; Ayu & Ahmad, 2014). NFC-based and RFID attendance monitoring systems implement a unique ID using cards or tags as an indicator of the user’s attendance. Biometrics-based systems use physical features from users to indicate attendance.

The three methods possess their own advantages and disadvantages. There is a need to identify elements in which approach may perform better than the others. These systems mostly authenticate attendance confirmation upon validation of fixed criteria set in the system and therefore lack the flexibility. After all, the act of attendance-taking itself is a situation that is affected by various varying factors. The field of this research paper will mainly focus on attendance data processing and management. Data processing is the collection and manipulation of data to produce meaningful information. Data such as attendance records can be used to be analysed in terms of its patterns and present rules and decision-making system to further automate the attendance management system. The objectives of this research are to investigate the existing approaches for attendance management system and to compare the different approaches for attendance data management systems. It is also aimed to identify elements and propose a framework for case-based authentication in attendance data management system.

In this study, the proposed system will be evaluated in comparison to the existing approaches in terms of functionalities. The research approach will be conducted based on a qualitative approach. A research study is performed through relevant researches on the three methods by comparing their method of approach in attendance authentication and their data processing part.

Problem Statement

Attendance management is a system that encompasses different phases ranging from the enrolment process of participants in a session, attendance recording, monitoring to the assessment of the attendance performance. For that reason, the implementation of an intelligent attendance data monitoring system would provide efficient design and framework for the administration of attendance in institutions.

The research topic shall revolve around the management aspect of the attendance data collected and the authentication approach. The main objective of the research study is to identify elements such as authentication of attendance from the existing approaches that have been developed and comparatively discuss them. Each approach will be briefly discussed in the section and comparatively analysed accordingly at the end of the section.

Research Questions

The methodology process will further introduce the approach and implementation steps in the research. The research process as shown in Figure 01 is carried out first by defining the research question through a series of proper group discussions and consultations. After much background study and discussions, the main research question of the study is identified to be “Which approach is the best for an attendance management system in adapting to different situations?” Such research questions guided through the process of constructing research problems. To know the best approach in the attendance management system, the existing approaches of systems are studied and compared. Among many approaches, the study will only focus on three approaches in attendance management system. Then, elements that thrived will be selected into a new framework.

The research shall be approached using a qualitative approach to investigate the attendance data processing and management in relation to case-based experiences. In the qualitative approach, the Content Analysis Study method is used to examine the patterns and different cases that may be presented from the usage of the attendance management system. Using such approach, knowledge can be derived from the data collected. The process of acquiring knowledge is done through different approaches such as interviews and online resources to collect and identify all the functional and non-functional requirements of the prototype system. After defining the user and system requirements, a prototype of the system will be constructed.

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Purpose of the Study

The prototype system will be populated with different data presented in an attendance-taking situation. These data will be analysed and processed according to the different cases. These data will then be categorized into the different case of data to be analysed and test the functionality of the proposed system. In the research study, there is also the need to determine the scope of limitations and delimitations that may affect or constrict the analysis of research data. The limitations in the research investigation are the time constraints and limited data populated as cases into the system. Delimitations in our investigation are focusing only on different elements as identified in existing approaches and emphasis on the data processing in the attendance management system.

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These processes can be divided into three main stages which are Attendance Registration, Attendance Verification (Authentication) and Attendance Performance Assessment. The research will cover the discussion and evaluation of the proposed system in comparison to the existing approaches. The uniqueness of the proposed system lies in the inferencing part constructed as one of the functionalities of the system to determine the authentication process of the system. The proposed system as shown in Figure 02 will be the system architecture to test the proposed framework of the new system. The process flow of the system is illustrated as shown in Figure 03 .

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Research Methods

The proposed framework comprises several components: server, database, and client application. The client applications specified are smartphones for mobile applications and web-based applications. For web applications, the Apache is suggested as the webserver to deliver the official web pages. The webpage is hosted by WampServer as the webpage can be tested offline first. Hence, the risk of creating problems on live server can be reduced. This server-side scripting language that designed for web development and used as general-purpose programming language has been chosen for the web application. Generally, Firebase is selected as a real-time backend infrastructure primarily for real-time database usage. Firebase is chosen because synchronization of data across devices can be done easily across various applications. There is no need for any server-side coding or RESTful API configuration to show changes in data. Firebase Real-time database is a NoSQL database in which it allows operations to be executed quickly and scalable structures. Hence, users can use their smartphones to connect to the Internet and access the attendance data easily.

Findings

The data collection process will be carried out by testing the elements included in the proposed framework. The results are obtained by testing different parts of the functionalities in using the prototype application on Android smartphones. The results are then used to measure its fulfilment of user requirements and compared to the existing approaches. The proposed system however only accepts data acquired from smartphone devices with the installed prototype application and NFC tags.

Conclusion

The result of the framework which differs from the other existing approach is that it allows flexible attendance authentication as authorized by the user administrator. From the different patterns of attendance data collected, the proposed system automated the process of attendance verification and provides an alert system if any of the attendance requirements are violated. Overall, the proposed system in this research paper contains space for further improvement. The user interface and experience of the system plays an important part. It can be further enhanced to provide automated and limited user intervention in the system attracting interface for users. The system is also expected to detect more cases of attendance settings and include better data visualizations in future work.

Acknowledgments

This research is funded under USM RU Grant (PKOMP/8014001) and partly under USM Short Term Grant (PKOMP/6315262) and affiliated with Robotics, Computer Vision & Image Processing (RCVIP) Research Group Lab at School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia.

References

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