Automated Real-Time Parking Management for Smart Cities

Abstract

The proper management of available parking spaces to enable a driver to locate the parking slot quickly during busiest hours of the day in the urban areas is a major concern to the city authorities. So, a significant amount of research works have been devoted to the development of smart parking systems over the past few years. Most of these have paid attention to the detection of free parking slot within the parking areas along with guiding the driver to reach the parking area. Very few works have paid attention to the real-time management of all parking spaces available within a city. By keeping track of the occupancy status of all the parking spaces available within a city, it is possible to aid not only the driver to locate his/her preferable parking spot quickly but also the city authorities in generating revenues by proper utilization of the parking spaces. Thus, this paper presents an automated real-time parking management system for smart cities to address the above mentioned issues. The proposed parking management system provides online reservation facility for the parking spot in a secured manner via an android application that is to be installed on the driver’s phone and also integrate an electronic payment gateway to enable automatic collection of the parking charges by the city authorities. The experimental results and various screenshots of the mobile client application provided in this paper validate the effectiveness of the proposed system.