Understanding Smart and Automated Parking Technology

Abstract

The rapidly growing urban population of India is creating many problems for the cities, vehicle parking being one of the major problems faced almost every day. The number of vehicles is also increasing daily adding to the parking vows at public places. India has more than 40 million vehicles as of 2014. The traffic on roads and parking space has been an area of concern in majority of Indian cities. To avoid these problems, recently many new technologies have been developed that help in solving the parking problems to a great extent. Multi-level car parking system (MLCPS) is one such technology which is implemented in India. It is used for optimum utilization of parking space by utilizing vertical space rather than horizontal space. Some of the benefits of MLCPS are optimum utilization of space, low construction cost, low working and maintenance cost to name a few. Although automated parking(Mathijssen & Pretorius, 2005) [1] like multilevel parking has made the condition a little better than the earlier situation, there is still scope for improvement. This is because people still face problems of space availability, searching time and waiting time in public places like malls, multiplexes, railway stations, shopping streets etc. With the new technology of smart parking, majority of these issues will be solved. Smart parking uses sensors, wireless communication technology, data analytics(Aggarwal, 2011) [2] etc. to solve parking issues. Smart parking solutions can be used to locate available parking space with the help of sensors. This saves customer’s time as well as minimizes wastage of fuel. Various technologies are being used to ease parking problems in public places. For example using RFID technology, the check in and checkout time for the vehicle can be reduced and also the payment system can be automated. Similarly using wireless sensors information like parking duration, available slot, billing details, directional details etc. can be obtained which will help the drivers and will thus ease out parking vows. Using GSM, Short message service can also be used to provide drivers with relevant parking information. In another technology which uses QR code, the user can pre book the desired parking space which saves his searching time and also saves fuel. In automated multilevel car parking, the car is lifted and placed at the available slot. This is done with the help of robotics and a lot of software programming.