A Web-Based Automated Hostel Management System with Rule-Based Hybrid Allocation for University Student Accommodation

The manual system, prolonged queues at the cashier counter, misplaced records, and double allocation of accommodation in hostels remain an issue in the management of university accommodation in many universities in Nigeria. During registration periods, long queues (4 to 6 hours) form, and physical clearance forms are lost up to 10–15%, resulting in ineffective administrative procedures and unhappy students at Adeleke University. This paper suggests an automated hostel management system using web technology, which resolves these issues by proposing a hybrid allocation model, using rules, that is based on the choice of the student and institutional fairness. It has a three-tier architecture, with a React/TypeScript front end, a Gin backend written in Go (Golang) and a PostgreSQL database in third normal form. Students are allotted a hostel according to the institutional rules based on gender, level and faculty and then they choose a room from the rooms available in that hostel. Row-level database locking in ACID transactions provides concurrency safety, even at peak load. Stateless JSON Web Token authentication provides security for the 3 types of users (Student, Administrator, Super Administrator) for role based access. All the functional test cases were evaluated and they all passed, allocation took 2–3 seconds and the average latency of the backend was below 200ms for 500 concurrent requests. The automated system eliminated the record loss, the over-allocation errors and the processing delays that were associated with the manual approach. This research is aimed at providing a production-ready, concurrency-safe hostel management system that would be a viable alternative to manual hostel management for Nigerian universities. Future work will include adding online payment integration, real-time notifications, and machine learning-based allocation optimization. Keywords: Automated allocation, Hostel management, Rule-based system, Student accommodation, Concurrency control, Web application.