Additional 2- Booking & Reservation System Design

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This week, I concentrated on the Booking & Reservation System, one of the recently necessary features for the FoodNextDoor platform, in response to the comments on our proposal. My work this week focused on designing a system that guarantees equitable access to food items, prevents hoarding, and fosters trust between donors and recipients, whereas previous weeks focused on the community fridge locator and food posting.

One issue with food redistribution, according to our previous research, is that first-come, first-served models may result in unfair outcomes, where some users may take multiple items while others are left out . By allowing users to reserve food items, a booking system gives them structure and reassures them that the item will still be available when they arrive. This supports the objective of our project, which is to encourage equitable and open sharing.


I'm working on the reservation feature's workflow this week. The following procedure is part of my design:


From the food listings (posted by donors), the user chooses an item.

The item is momentarily stored in the system after a reservation request is created.

A confirmation request is sent to the donor, who can choose to accept or reject.

The reservation is locked for a specified period of time (for example, two hours) after it is confirmed.

A pickup code or QR code is sent to the user to show at the time of collection.


To demonstrate this procedure, I created a sequence diagram, which you can view below. This guarantees the booking system's flexibility and transparency.

Technical Points to Consider


I also looked into potential strategies for putting this booking feature into practice:

Database design: calls for a new table, such as Reservations, to hold time stamps, booking ID, user ID, food item ID, and status (pending, confirmed, or expired).

Fairness logic: in order to prevent hoarding, the system will cap the number of active reservations per user.

Integration: To guarantee that users are reminded of collection deadlines, the reservation workflow integrates directly with the notification system.


References

Trivette, S.A. (2019) How local food pantries achieve their mission: organizational strategies and social services. (journal) Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition, 14(3), pp. 1–16.


Google Cloud (2025) Designing reservation systems with Cloud SQL (Online) Google cloud https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs

Firebase (2025) Real-time database for reservations and bookings (Online) Firebase https://firebase.google.com/docs/database


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