Central Workshop Machine Slot Booking System

College central workshops own expensive shared machines — centre lathes, milling machines, pillar drills, CNC routers — that every mechanical and production batch needs for mini and major projects. In most colleges the booking still happens on a paper register at the workshop office: students queue to write their names, double bookings surface only at the machine, and the faculty in-charge has no record of who used what and when. The result is idle machines sitting next to frustrated students, and zero utilisation data for maintenance or purchase planning. This project replaces the register with a web application. Machines and their hourly slots are visible to every student on a live grid, booking requests flow through a faculty approval queue, and every confirmed, cancelled or completed booking is logged. A week-calendar view shows the whole workshop at a glance, and utilisation reports turn the log into decisions — peak hours, most-used machines and no-show patterns.

1. The admin registers machines (name, code, status) and the daily slot template (e.g. eight 1-hour slots, 09:00–17:00).
2. A student logs in, opens a machine card and sees today's slots colour-coded free or booked.
3. Selecting a free slot opens the booking form — purpose, faculty guide, safety-briefing confirmation — and submits a PENDING request.
4. The faculty in-charge opens the approval queue and approves or rejects; the decision notifies the student and locks or releases the slot.
5. The week view renders every machine's confirmed bookings as a calendar; the student's own bookings are highlighted.
6. Cancellations release the slot immediately. The reports module aggregates the booking log into per-machine utilisation and peak-hour charts.

Tech stack:

• PHP · Laravel (REST API + Blade views)
• MySQL (relational schema with seed data)
• HTML · CSS · JavaScript (responsive frontend)
• Role-based access (student, faculty in-charge, admin)
• Session authentication
• Email notification hooks
• Chart.js utilisation reports
• Git

• [Live availability grid] Every machine's hourly slots for the day are colour-coded free or booked, so students know availability without visiting the workshop office.
• [Slot booking with purpose] Booking requests capture the purpose of use, faculty guide and safety-briefing confirmation — the same information the paper register tried to hold.
• [Faculty approval queue] The in-charge sees all pending requests in one table and approves or rejects with one click; students are notified of the decision.
• [Week calendar view] All machines rendered as a Mon–Fri calendar with booked blocks attributed to students, including the viewer's own bookings highlighted.
• [Database-level conflict prevention] A unique constraint on (machine, date, slot) makes double booking impossible even under concurrent requests.
• [Utilisation reports] Bookings per machine, peak-hour bands and no-show tracking give the workshop data for maintenance scheduling.
• [Cancellation & no-show handling] Students cancel from their bookings page, freeing the slot instantly; repeated no-shows are flagged per the configured policy.

• Complete working web application (booking, approvals, calendar, reports)
• Database schema with seed data (machines, slots, demo users and bookings)
• Admin panel for machine and slot-template management
• Project report PDF (SRS, ER diagram, DFD, test cases, screenshots)
• PPT presentation for final review
• Viva Q&A preparation document (scheduling logic, RBAC, conflict handling, reporting)