Development of an Automated Liquefied Petroleum Gas Station Detection Mechanism Using Haversine Principle and A* Algorithm

Abstract

Ever since the discovery of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), there has been a drastic increase in its usage both by home and industrial consumers. Meanwhile, as consumer migrates from one location to another, locating the nearest gas station particularly for rural and semi-urban dwellers has been a challenge. Therefore, in this work an automated liquefied petroleum gas station detection mechanism was developed using Haversine principle and A* algorithm. The automated mechanism was based on a goggle geo-coding application programming interface in laravel structure, placing potential users and gas agencies on latitude and longitude of a particular geographic location. The Haversine principle was used to calculate the distance between the user location and the gas station to help consumer to choose the nearest gas station closer to them based on predefined radius, while A* algorithm was employed to display the shortest path route on the goggle map between the user and closest gas station. The system was implemented using hypertext preprocessor, laravel python and java programming language all version 7 on android operating system. The mechanism when tested in the real world scenario performed well and suitably met its objective.