Design and Development of Mobile-Based Shuttle Reservation System with NFC Boarding Verification for Institutional Environments

Internal shuttle services in universities, corporate campuses, industrial estates, and large hospitals face two operational problems: manual form-based reservations that create allocation conflicts and weak no-show accountability, and first-in-first-out (FIFO) services that leave demand data unrecorded. Existing commercial transport applications and appointment systems do not address the specific constraints of these environments, including closed and identifiable user populations, non-payment service models, underused NFC identity infrastructure, and dual shuttle operations with different failure modes. This study applies the Design Science Research (DSR) paradigm to design and develop a mobile-based shuttle reservation system with boarding verification using institutional NFC cards as non-payment identity credentials. Following the six-phase process model of Peffers et al. (2007), the study produces an instantiation artifact in the form of a configurable single-tenant system template whose core design principles can be generalized beyond one institutional setting. The main contribution is an instance of DSR Exaptation, where existing navigation, reservation, and contactless identity technologies are repurposed for institutional shuttle constraints. Evaluation uses a requirements traceability matrix and a scenario-based walkthrough covering five operational cases. Expected outcomes include eliminating uncertain FIFO queues, reducing boarding time, improving passenger-count predictability, and strengthening accountability through automatic no-show penalties with force majeure exception handling.