Implementation of Smart Parking System in Jelgava City in Latvia

Development of smart city concept is challenging for every city. Smart city approach consists of several components and one of them is smart traffic. Parking is one of the smart traffic components. Due to the rapid growth of vehicles on the streets, finding an available parking space is becoming a big obstacle in modern life. For cities with large number of residents or places where sports or artistic events take place, search for a free parking lot is a major problem and can be a frustrating experience. Parking management system affects and improves people's daily life experience and is an important component of a modern traffic system. Smart parking system allows drivers to obtain real-time parking data, by using Internet of things technologies to gather and process information from parking lots. Thus, intelligent, innovative and efficient ways for parking are needed to coordinate the parking demands efficiently. Authors of this paper share the approach, which is implemented in Jelgava city in Latvia, where two smart parking systems are developed. One system is based on inductive sensors, which can recognize vehicle on each parking lot. Second approach is based on vehicle identification on video stream, which is used to register cars on parking entrance and exit, counting total number of free parking lots, but without indicating which particular lots are free or occupied.