Enhancing University Study Spaces with a Smart Room Booking Application

This project report presents the design and development of BookIT, a smart room booking system tailored for Mälardalen University in Västerås and Eskilstuna, Sweden. The system addresses limitations in existing solutions such as KronoX, which

lack intuitive interfaces, smart allocation, and community-driven features. Our approach integrates real-time availability updates, fair allocation algorithms, and event-based booking to promote balanced room usage and improve user experience. The application was developed using Kotlin with Jetpack Compose for the frontend, ensuring a responsive and modern UI. Core functionalities include room search with filters, calendar-based booking, reservation management, and a community board for event creation and participation. Mapbox integration provides an interactive campus map across multiple floors, enabling users to easily locate available rooms. Authentication and role-based access were implemented through JWT and Passport.js, while Express.js with Prisma handled backend logic, database interactions, and security features such as encrypted credentials and HTTPS enforcement. Collaboration tools including Figma, Jira, Git, and Zoom facilitated distributed teamwork, ensuring consistency in design and efficient task allocation. Feedback during supervision meetings highlighted improvements in search intuitiveness, event management, and overall usability, which were incorporated into iterative development. The results demonstrate a scalable, secure, and user-friendly booking platform with strong potential for expansion and adaptation to other academic institutions. Future work will focus on refining allocation algorithms, addressing identified security issues, and enhancing the user experience through extended personalization and testing.