A smart parking advisor using mobile technology

Abstract

Technology continues to advance at an impressive rate. As technology progresses, new solutions to established challenges continue to evolve and mature. A typical and continuously evolving challenge and associated maturing solutions exist in most parking landscape. By scrutinising the parking scenario at the University of Malta (UOM) for testing and development reasons, several challenges in this particular context have been established. Identification of a free parking spot for a client during peak hours in a continuously changing scenario through an automated system is considered a major challenge. In this light, a key objective of this research project is to consider, evaluate and establish a set of essential perspectives related to smart parking systems and apply them in the context of the University parking scenario. "A smart parking system is a combination of intelligent actions using a combination of hardware, software and data communications to efficiently manage a vehicle parking area".(ldris et al., 2009 p. 114) By conducting an in-depth analysis, the opportunity to come up with a smart parking system has been identified. The contribution of this research includes a thorough literature review and subsequent proposition of an enabling prototype. This contribution comprises various academic perspectives, such as machine learning and forecasting that can be applied in this particular context. This contribution and the proposed prototype provide functionality, including forecasting of parking patterns, allocating parking spots according to the user preferences, as well as avoiding relevant vehicle collision through synchronisation, based on sound academic grounding and theory.