Predicting vehicle parking space availability using multilayer perceptron neural network

Abstract

In this study, we have investigated potential use of Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to predict parking space availability for use within Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) accelerated embedded devices. While previous studies have explored the use of MLP for classification problem in FPGA, very little studies concentrated on the potential use of MLP in regression problem, especially in parking space forecasting. Therefore we formulated five Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) models with varying hidden units to perform single-step prediction to forecast parking space availability within the next 15 minutes based on the previous one-hour parking occupancy. The proposed models were trained on the historical data of Kuala Lumpur Convention Center dataset and evaluated against baseline ARIMA models. The results have shown that our proposed MLP model performed relatively well against baseline model with the root mean square error between (RMSE) 78.25 to 78.41 and mean absolute error (MAE) between 37.02 to 39.17.