Centralized-Decentralized-Hybrid Student Attendance Management System with Trust Regulation

Attendance of students in university classrooms is vital for their cognitive development and the development of the nation’s economy. This work enhances student attendance management by improving the reliability and accountability of the process economically. It first defines the system functionality in the form of use cases, systematically considering the interaction between the users and the system in a typical university environment, and then designs the system using a combination of the traditional client-server (centralized) architecture and scalable, fault-tolerant and secure peer-to-peer (decentralized) architecture offered by the blockchain. The defined user interaction models harness the hierarchical organisational structure to trade the trust the system offers for the cost of attendance. The system was validated using a Web 3.0-compliant web application prototype, and the core functionality of attendance recording was tested. The result analysis demonstrates the feasibility of regulating the trust affordably offered by the system.