Towards a Smart Parking Management System for Smart Cities

Smart parking management aims to leverage advanced sensing and monitoring technologies to optimize the usage of parking spots within large car parks and ease parking for drivers by directing them to available parking spots, thereby reducing unnecessary stress and delay that further worsen the traffic conditions. The idea of smart parking development began to make parking easier, faster, with less of a drain on resources which are slowly disappearing. The aim of the Smart Parking Management System (SPMS) proposed in this paper is to assist drivers in alleviating several issues linked to parking. Our SPMS provides a sensing platform supported by a mobile app to enable real-time interaction of drivers with the car park infrastructure in a way that minimizes drivers' search time for an empty parking spot within large multi-storey car parks and facilitates the localization of their parked cars. To validate the efficiency of our SPMS, a small scale test-bed was developed as a proof of concept and tested under five different scenarios. The obtained results highlight its effectiveness and call for its potential integration in real world car parks.