International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering, Vol. 6, No.

1, February 2014

A Location Based Time and Attendance System

Mohammad Salah Uddin, Member, IACSIT, S. M. Allayear, N. C. Das, and F. A. Talukder

 employed to perform all the necessary calculations to

Abstract—Time and Attendance System provides many generate employee time-sheets which are used to calculate
benefits to organizations. It enables an employer to have full the employees' wages. An automated system reduces the risk
control of all employees working hours. It helps control labour of errors that are common in a manual system, and allows the
costs by reducing over-payments, which are often caused by
transcription error, interpretation error and intentional error.
workforce to be more productive instead of wasting time on
Manual processes are also eliminated as well as the staff needed tedious administrative tasks. [3] This paper proposed an
to maintain them. It is often difficult to comply with labour Automated Time and Attendance System that use Location
regulation, but a time and attendance system is invaluable for instead of traditional methods.
ensuring compliance with labour regulations regarding proof of
attendance.
Every Organization has a specific location, which is II. RELATED WORK
determine by the GPS. The location of an employee can be
determined by GPS device (Mobile Phone, GPS watch or GPS In this section, we review some related technologies and
enabled device etc.). If the location of an employee and the previous works on the topic of location based application.
location of organization is same (Approx.), then it should be said Geolocationing is the first step to providing location based
that, the employee is in the office. This paper use location as a services. The most widely used locationing technologies are
proof of attendance and proposed a new time and attendance
system based on location.
GPS, Wi-Fi, Cellular, Bluetooth, Infrared, and Radio
Frequency Identification (RFID). Researchers work on these
Index Terms—Location-based service, GPS, locationing, time technologies for improving the services, such as accuracy
and attendance system, android, apps. and environmental effects. Using a single locationing
technology, improve the locationing accuracy of RFID by
developing reference tags in the field. Locationing accuracy
I. INTRODUCTION can also be improved by combining two or more locationing
Now a days, two types of attendance system are available, technologies [4].
i) Manual and ii) Automated. Manual time and attendance A number of related works exist on the application of
systems use paper time cards and time sheets that employees different methods and principles to effectively monitor the
fill out and managers oversee for accuracy. However, time attendance of individual. In [5], an embedded computer
and attendance information is subject to human error when based lecture attendance management system was proposed.
various employees such as workers, managers, and payroll The system provides an improvised electronic card and card
administrators all perform tasks that involve recording the reader serially interfaced to the digital computer system.
numbers. Employees punch in and out when they arrive at Attendance Management has also been carried out using
work, go to lunch, take a break, or leave for the day. attendance software that uses passwords for authentication.
Generally, managers must add up the minutes and hours The authors in [6] designed and implemented a system that
worked, using each employee's time card, and fill in a time authenticates the user based on passwords, this type of
sheet indicating hours worked for the week. Managers also system allows for impersonation since the password can be
spend time filling out attendance records based on whether shared or tampered with. Passwords could also be forgotten
employees punched the clock. A lot of man hours go into at times thereby preventing the user from accessing the
calculating time and attendance when using a manual system system.
[1]. Other attendance solutions are RFID-based student
Automated time and attendance systems can use electronic attendance system. Problem with RFID [7] based systems is
tags, bar-code badges, magnetic stripe cards, biometrics that individuals have to carry RFID cards and also the RFID
(hand, fingerprint, or facial), and touch screens [2] in place of detectors are needed to be installed [8].
paper cards which employees touch or swipe to identify The application of attendance system using biometric
themselves and record their working hours as they enter or system has been demonstrated by Simao, Fonseca and Santos
leave the work area. The recorded information is then ideally [9] with integration of wireless communications. However,
automatically transferred to a computer for processing the weaknesses of the system has been discovered by Zhang
although some systems require an operator to physically et al. [10] by introducing palm-print which developed an
transfer data from the clocking point to the computer using a attendance system to record the employee attendance.
portable memory device. The computer may then be Meanwhile a similar project has been implemented by
Kardry and Smaili [11] which applied wireless Iris
Manuscript received July 2, 2013; revised September 10, 2013. recognition attendance management system. In Bio-metric
The authors are with the Department of Computer Science and identification security is the main concern; if we lost our
Engineering, East West University, Dhaka, Bangladesh (e-mail:
akash.bangla@gmail.com). biometric identification database then our biometric

DOI: 10.7763/IJCTE.2014.V6.832 36
 International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering, Vol. 6, No. 1, February 2014

identification is totally compromised. information to Database.

C. Flow of Operation
III. THE PROPOSED LOCATION BASED TIME AND Since location-based time and attendance system uses
ATTENDANCE SYSTEM Mobile Application and a time and attendance management
software for processing data. So, the flows of operation of the
A. System Overview Mobile application are:-
The system replaces the traditional Identification Card by a 1) Determine the location using GPS
mobile application. The application was installed on users 2) Check the location with pre-stored (office/workspace)
mobile. A unique user ID and location (GPS coordinate) was location
associated with the application. A time and attendance 3) Encrypts user ID and Location
software was installed on workstation for process the data 4) Send information to the system
receive from user mobile and store the information (time, Fig. 3 shows the flows of operation of Mobile application.
entry and leaving) to the Database. The basic block diagram First, the application figure out the location using GPS. Then,
is shown in Fig. 1. its check the location with pre stored (office/workspace)
location, if location matched then the application makes a
data packet containing user ID and location , encrypt them
and send it to the management system.

Fig. 1. Basic block diagram of location-based time and attendance system. Fig. 3. Flows of operations for mobile application.

B. System Architecture The flows of operation of the management software are:-

1) Receive data from Mobile application
The schematic diagram of our location-based time and
2) Decrypts the data
attendance system is shown in Fig. 2. This system employs
3) Retrieve user ID from Database
four hardware and software components, described as
4) User Identification
follows. The smartphone is built-in with a GPS receiver,
5) Store the information.
which can receive radio signals from GPS satellites,
respectively. Google maps API (Application Programming
Interface) is used here for finding personal meaningful
location; based on the GPS readings, the application can
perform geo-locationing to estimate the current location of
the user.

Fig. 4. Flows of operation for Time and Attendance Management software.

Fig. 4 shows the flows of operation of the management

system software. The software first receives the information
from the mobile application. Then its decrypt the information
and check for validation. After passing the validation steps it
store the information to the database according to the user ID.

IV. IMPLEMENTATION
Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of the proposed location-based time and Due to the shortest of time the proposed model is not
attendance system.
totally completed. The hardware requirements are Android
Then the application sends the location and user Id to Time [12] & GPS [13] enable phone or tabs or any device that is
and Attendance Management Software for further process. used as a user identification tools. A time and Attendance
After processing the data the management software store the Management Software which interacts with user device is

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 International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering, Vol. 6, No. 1, February 2014

required. The software is also connected with Database for [9] P. Simao, J. Fonseca, and V. Santos, “Time attendance system with
multistation and wireless communications,” in Proc. IEEE
storing data. There are several tools/ methods are available International Symposium on Consumer Electronics, 2008, pp. 1-4.
for developing time and attendance management software [10] M. Wong et al., “Online Palmprint Identification”, IEEE Trans. on
such as .Net, java, php etc. Eclipse IDE [14] with Android Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 25, no. 9, pp.
1041-1050, Sept 2003.
Development Tools will be used for developing the android
[11] S. Kadry and K. Smaili, “A Design and Implementation of a Wireless
(Mobile) application. Iris Recognition Attendance Management System,” Information
Technology and Control Kaunas, Techbologija, vol. 36, no. 3, pp.
323-329, 2007.
[12] J. Chen, An Introduction to Android, 2008.
V. COMPARISON [13] C. Rizos, Introduction to GPS, University of New South Wales, 1999.
Table I shows the comparison between traditional [14] M. Dexter, Eclipse and Java for Total Beginners Companion Tutorial
Document, Bebag, 2011.
Attendance System and The proposed System.

TABLE I: A COMPARISON BETWEEN PROPOSED MODEL AND TRADITIONAL

SYSTEM Mohammad Salah Uddin is a lecturer in the
TRADITIONAL PROPOSED Department of Computer science and Engineering,
SYSTEM SYSTEM Central Women’s University, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Cost High Low He is a member of IACSIT and Software
Engineering and Formal Method Research Group of
Maintenance Requires skilled people Anyone can East West University. He received his B.Sc in
Installation Not so easy Very easy Computer Science and Engineering from East West
University, Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2012. He passed
Fully Not fully automated, Fully automated
his Higher Secondary Certificate (H.S.C) and
Automated you may touch or Secondary School Certificate (S.S.C) form Dania College, Dhaka,
punch something Bangladesh in 2004 and Shajahanpur Railway Colony Govt. High School,
Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2002. He published several journal and international
conference paper from his research work.
His research interest includes web service composition, semantic web
VI. CONCLUSION service, knowledge representation, mobile apps, location based service,
This paper introduce a Location based Time and software engineering, software product line, modeling and verification,
artificial intelligence, digital image processing, etc.
Attendance System, that use Location as the key of
attendance. The coordinates of an organization and an
employee can be determined by the help of GPS device, both
Shaikh Muhammad Allayear is a full time faculty
coordinate are same means employee is present in the
member of Department of Computer Science and
organization. We currently developing the system for Engineering (CSE), East West University, Dhaka,
Android enable smartphones/ Tabs. In future we extend our Bangladesh holding the position of Assistant
system for iPhones and other mobile phones. Professor. He has completed his Ph.D. in Computer
Science & Engineering from Anyang
University,South Korea in 2009. From the same
ACKNOWLEDGMENT university, he has completed his M.Sc in Computer
Science & Engineering in 2004. Before joining
This paper is made possible through the help and support here, he was a part time lecturer of Department of Computer Science &
from everyone, including: parents, teachers, family, and Engineering, Anyang University, South Korea. He has 8 years research
friends. experience from well reputed research company in Korea.
His research interest includes network storage, internet computing,
Especially, please allow us to dedicate our parallel & distributed system, high performance computing, mobile
acknowledgment to Dr. Shamim H Ripon, Associate computing, information security, etc.
Professor of East West University, Aftabnagar, Dhaka,
Bangladesh for his most support and encouragement.
Nakul Chandra Das completed his B.Sc in
REFERENCES Computer Science and Engineering from East West
University, Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2013. He is a
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http://www.en.wikipedia.org
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[3] Automated Time and Attendance System. [Online]. Available:
line.
http://www.gatekeepersolutions.com
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for Mobile Users, Springer Verlag, London, 2013.
[5] O. Shoewu, O. M. Olaniyi, and A. Lawson. “Embedded
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Bangladesh. He completed his B.Sc in Computer
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Science and Engineering form East West University,
for large classes with rental PCs by web system WTS,” in Proc. Data
Dhaka, Bangladesh 2013. He passed his Higher
Engineering Workshop (DEWS2005), 1D – d3 (in Japanese), 2005.
Secondary Certificate (H.S.C.) from Nasirabad
[7] O. Shoewu, and O. Badejo, “Radio frequency identification
College, Mymensingh, Bangladesh in 2007 and
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Niketon High School, Mymensingh, Bangladesh in
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