Key factors in converting shopping mall car parks into smart parking facilities

With the advent of modern technologies, including the IoT and blockchain, smart-parking (SP) systems are becoming smarter and smarter. Similar to other automated systems, and particularly those that require automation or minimal interaction with humans, the SP system is heuristic in delivering performances, such as throughput in terms of latency, efficiency, privacy, and security, and it is considered a long-term cost-effective solution. This study looks ahead to future trends and developments in SP systems and presents an inclusive, long-term, effective, and well-performing smart autonomous vehicle parking (SAVP) system that explores and employs the emerging fog-computing and blockchain technologies as robust solutions to strengthen the existing collaborative IoT–cloud platform to build and manage SP systems for autonomous vehicles (AVs). In other words, the proposed SAVP system offers a smart-parking solution, both indoors and outdoors, and mainly for AVs looking for vacant parking, wherein the fog nodes act as a middleware layer that provides various parking operations closer to IoT-enabled edge devices. To address the challenges of privacy and security, a lightweight integrated blockchain and cryptography (LIBC) module is deployed, which is functional at each fog node, to authorize and grant access to the AVs in every phase of parking (e.g., from the parking entrance to the parking slot to the parking exit). A proof-of-concept implementation was conducted, wherein the overall computed results, such as the average response time, efficiency, privacy, and security, were examined as highly efficient to enable a proven SAVP system. This study also examined an innovative pace, with careful considerations to combatting the existing SP-system challenges and, therefore, to building and managing future scalable SP systems.

The smart parking management system makes parking management ease in shopping mall. This system will make availability of parking during weekends/rushing hours in shopping malls. This system includes two steps. One is pre-reservation of parking for vehicle owners, and the other is parking management system for vendor. Smart parking system will provide current parking availability status for vehicle owners. If available, they can reserve the parking after making online payment or else they can find another parking area. The application used by parking management will manage all parking areas and will be used for making reservation on entry of vehicle. This will be very helpful in saving the time and a lot of efforts for finding a space to park the vehicle, especially during the weekends. User can connect to the smart parking system from anywhere with their smart phones in any browser. And this information is also available to the parking operators to determine the free parking areas, and statistics can be measured at different times in a day on each parking space.

The idea of smart cities has gained momentum in recent times which is becoming more popular with the upcoming concept of the internet of things. Smart cities particularly aim to use the resources efficiently and integrating with it has increased the productivity and reliability over the technology for the urban infrastructure. IoT can cater to many complex situations and one such problem faced by the commuters in smart cities is of parking as with increasing number of vehicles and scarcity of parking facility and traffic congestion there is a demand of smart parking system which solves this problem. This IoT smart and efficient parking system will not only solve the problems from the consumers perspective but also would solve difficulties faced by the management of these parking lots, with the IoT tapping in this system the consumer will save more time by booking spot prior to his/her arrival at the spot and would reduce time searching for a good spot for parking when actually being at the destination, from the management’s point view it would help in decreasing the manpower requirement used for maintaining such parking lots and would also help them use their resources more efficiently. In this paper, we proposed a smart parking system (IoT enabled) which continuously monitor and check for the available area for parking and engage the area in the particular place it is designed for. This would be the most efficient system designed for the smart cities which would definitely help in the betterment of the traffic conditions that people have been facing over a decade now, Thus the system is designed for optimum utilization of the parking spaces will save time and by these system traffic congestion would be reduced to a greater extent.

Internet of Things (IoT) enables Smart Cities (SC) with novel services for the citizens’ well-being. A Smart Parking (SP) system is an important part of the SC infrastructure, which enables the efficient handling of the demanding SC traffic congestion conditions. Such a system also protects the urban environment towards a green ecosystem. In this paper, we consider Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms towards processing of data produced by parking lots and disseminated by IoT technology in the SC of St. Petersburg in Russia. Such algorithms enhance the proposed SP system to predict the number of unoccupied parking lots within the SC parking places. In addition, the SP system uses vehicle navigation to decide the optimal parking place according the current vehicle location and the availability of parking lots in the SC.

The problem of automatic parking lot identification and vehicle detection in open areas is becoming increasingly important due to the increase in the number of vehicles in Indonesia, particularly in big cities, resulting in difficulties in finding parking spaces during peak hours. In this condition, drivers often have to compete for parking spaces. This research aims to develop a smart parking system that integrates YOLOv5 and OpenCV algorithms. This approach thoroughly combines both algorithms to identify parking spaces and detect vehicles in real time in various parking scenarios. It is carried out in an open area with reference to parking conditions at the BRIN Bandung office. This study collected data from three different parking lot conditions, namely empty, partially occupied, and full. In each condition, the system successfully detected the parking lots and vehicles accurately. The novel contribution of this research is the development of a smart parking system that uses an integrated approach, providing an effective solution to the challenges of parking lot availability and vehicle detection. Using the advantages of both algorithms, we successfully created a system that can identify parking spaces and detect vehicles accurately and efficiently under various parking circumstances. Therefore, this research makes a significant contribution to the development of smart and adaptive parking management technology.

Background: The prime challenge in Parking Systems is to administer the parking during peak hours or peak seasons. Besides being time consuming, it is laborious. Amalgamation of various infrastructure of hardware and software is prodigious and thus adding to its conventional hardware, making the investment in Smart Parking solution highly hazardous and splintered. Electronic payment vendors causes another crucial drawback. Objective: With the evolution of technology, we have proposed the plan to diminish human endeavors to such a degree, that a limit of one individual will be required to deal with the total colossal parking spot and a most extreme of one or two volunteers if there should arise an occurrence of any technical issues with minimal cost of operation. Methods: In our proposed work we have used Infrared Sensors at each parking slot and also used a Node Micro Controller Unit, a Wi-Fi microchip for connectivity. The Internet of Things platform used over here is Blynk. Results: The proposed technique performs better compared to existing state-of-art methodologies as it is cost-effective and easy to implement. Also, this can maintain the total vehicle count of a particular day which can be used for further traffic analysis. Conclusion: This paper presents the prototype of a Smart Parking System based on the IR sensor and Node MCU which is connected to the Blynk app that monitors the whole parking lot. It provides an optimized parking solution for various places available with parking facilities throughout the city. The proposed Smart parking system enables the guard incharge to obtain necessary information on the availability of parking space and keep a track of the effective number of vehicles that have entered the arena via a suitable app.

Several studies found that Malaysian shopping malls have reported that traffic issues happen when entering malls. We have found out that the traditional car parking system is not fully utilised with advanced technologies. Here, we come out with a smart parking system called Smart Park. Smart Park is the evolution of the car parking system by integrating traditional parking systems, IoT devices and mobile applications together. Smart Park is important as it can overcome the traffic issue happening in car parks in Malaysian shopping malls. The goal of this study is to find a solution to save customers ‘time and enhance customers’ parking experience before entering the mall. We aim to solve public issues of wasting time in finding car parking in shopping malls and using advanced technologies to overcome the issues.

Smart Parking Sensors: State of the Art and Performance Evaluation

Smart parking systems, especially automated parking systems (APS), have become quite popular in developed nations as a solution to the challenges posed by urbanization, limited space, and the need for environmental sustainability. These systems bring a host of benefits, such as better space utilization, lower construction and operational costs, improved safety, and positive environmental impacts. This paper takes a closer look at notable examples of APS in advanced economies like the United States, Germany, and Canada, highlighting their advantages compared to traditional parking systems. Using a qualitative approach and multiple case studies, the research delves into how smart and sustainable parking systems have been implemented and their outcomes in these leading business economies, while also drawing lessons for urban transport in Nigeria. Case studies from places like Manhattan, Munich, and Toronto showcase how APS can enhance urban living by alleviating traffic congestion, reclaiming green spaces, and providing safer, more efficient parking options. The paper discusses the significance of these innovations for Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, especially in light of its rapidly growing urban population and increasing vehicle usage. It advocates for a policy shift in Nigeria towards the adoption of APS, suggesting that lessons from developed countries could help create a more efficient and sustainable parking infrastructure. By embracing these smart solutions, Nigeria can tackle its urbanization challenges while boosting public safety, environmental sustainability, and economic growth.

In crowded cities, searching for the availability of parking lots is a herculean task as it results in the wastage of drivers’ time, increases air pollution, and traffic congestion. Smart parking systems facilitate the drivers to determine the information about the parking lot in real time and book them depending on the requirement. But the existing smart parking systems necessitate the drivers to reveal their sensitive information that includes their mobile number, personal identity, and desired destination. This disclosure of sensitive information makes the existing centralized smart parking systems more vulnerable to service providers’ security breaches, single points of failure, and bottlenecks. In this paper, an Improved Asymmetric Consortium Blockchain and Homomorphically Computing Univariate Polynomial-based private information retrieval (IACB-HCUPPIR) scheme is proposed to ensure parking lots’ availability with transparency security in a privacy-preserving smart parking system. In specific, an improved Asymmetric Consortium Blockchain is used for achieving secure transactions between different parties interacting in the smart parking environment. It further adopted the method of Homomorphically Computing Univariate Polynomial-based private information retrieval (HCUPPIR) scheme for preserving the location privacy of drivers. The results of IACB-HCUPPIR confirmed better results in terms of minimized computation and communication overload with throughput, latency, and response time with maximized drivers’ privacy preservation. Moreover, the proposed fully homomorphic algorithm (FHE) was compared against partial-homomorphic encryption (PHE) and technique without encryption and found that the proposed model has quick communication in allocating the parking slots starting with 24.3 s, whereas PHE starts allocating from 24.7 s and the technique without encryption starts at 27.4 s. Thus, we ensure the proposed model performs well in allocating parking slots with less time and high security with privacy preservation.

This paper proposes a smart indoor car parking system that can be time and cost effective at the same time. The term “assistance” stands to signify that the parking will be conducted by line following robots carrying the car from the entrance of the parking area. In this paper we have discussed a real-life implementation of a conventional line following robot, using it for the indoor car parking system enhancement through some additional features; other than only following a line. Our proposed system will have its implementation cost really low due to the ease of availability of the required technology. The technologies available in the market at present in order to help with indoor car parking; mostly require some extra structural designs which can only be installed during the construction of new buildings. However, existing traditional parking systems are huge in numbers and cannot be reconstructed in a convenient manner to match those systems; even sometimes the renovation is impossible in some cases. Therefore, our newly featured line following robot can be a proposed solution to those existing problems in the available indoor car parking systems giving an efficient alternative for the users.

Smart parking system becomes essential nowadays specially in urban area because it can reduce the time and the fuel wasted in searching for an empty parking slot. The aim of this paper is to develop smart parking system based on improved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model. The proposed system consists of three stages: 1) OCR based parking slot detection, 2) User notification based on IoT approach, 3) Smart parking meter based on Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). In this system, the vacant parking slots are detected using improved OCR model by labeling the parking slots with specific characters. The system identifies empty parking slots by detecting these characters with installed camera above the parking slots, otherwise the parking slots are occupied. The performance of the proposed OCR model in detecting these characters is enhanced by considering two stages of advanced morphology filter to remove unwanted small/large objects from the image. The accuracy of the proposed OCR model is tested by eight images having different parking street textures as a background and characters written with seven font styles. The idea of detecting empty parking spaces is to share the number of vacancies on a website for the drivers searching for a parking space. However, a time-controlled parking system with different charge rate each hour can be considered to make the best utilization of parking spaces available in urban areas. Therefore, a smart parking meter is proposed to notify the user through Email about the time left that allowed to be parked and the change in charge rate. The proposed system is developed and implemented using vision assistant of LabView.

Edge computing-enabled secure and energy-efficient smart parking: A review

Recently there are many vehicle users have difficulty to find a parking area because no information full or empty parking slot so that it can cause congestion, pollution, and fuel inefficiency, because of these conditions can cause difficulty in controlling the parking management. By using microcontroller smart parking system (based on IoT) parking problems can be resolved. Smart Parking System is designed to make easier for parking users to get information on the availability of empty and filled parking slots, in addition to that parking users can also book for parking slots using web based applications. There are many phases to implement microcontroller based Smart Parking System i.e requirements systems, prototyping development, prototyping evaluation, coding system, testing and evaluation system. This system uses hardware such as Arduino Mega, Arduino Uno, Ethernet Shield, PN532, LDR, and NFC. The programming language used is C to configure Arduino and PHP which are used for the web interface while MySQL for database server. By Smart Parking Application, it is expected to help parking service users to get information and find empty parking slots through booking in the application so that it will be more efficient in time and parking management will be more controlled.

SummaryIn big cities, the drivers face a major problem in identifying an optimal vacant parking space for their vehicles as the number of vehicles has rapidly grown over the recent years. This objective of determining the available parking space results in wastage of time, air pollution, and traffic congestion. Smart parking systems facilitate the driver to book parking slots and attain real‐time parking information. However, the existing smart parking solutions necessitate the disclosure of sensitive information like desired destination from the vehicle drivers. Moreover, the current smart parking solutions are highly centralized, making them vulnerable for launching privacy breaches by service providers and resulting in the issues of single‐point failure. In this paper, ring signature and improved multi‐transaction mode consortium blockchain‐based private information retrieval (RS‐IMTMCB‐PIR) scheme is proposed for privacy preserving in smart parking system. This RS‐IMTMCB‐PIR scheme initially utilizes an improved multi‐transaction mode consortium blockchain constructed by different number of parking lot owners in order to achieve maximized parking offers based on the factor of availability, transparency, and security. It incorporates an improved private information retrieval approach for protecting the location privacy of drivers and secretly retrieving the offers of parking from the improved multi‐transaction mode consortium blockchain. It further utilizes the benefits of ring signature for permitting the drivers in a potential anonymous authentication process that aids in available parking slot reservation. The simulation results of this proposed RS‐IMTMCB‐PIR scheme portrayed a predominant performance in ensuring maximized degree of drivers' privacy with reduced computation and communication overheads.