Search for parking: A dynamic parking and route guidance system for efficient parking and traffic management

Parking space is a scarce resource in today?s cities. Travelers often spend a sizable amount of time searching for available parking spaces. This increases travelers? overall travel cost and causes additional congestion on the road. Without a good parking information guidance system, parking search remains a trial and error process. In this article, we propose a dynamic parking guidance system that integrates parking destination switching and real-time traffic routing. Drivers can switch their parking destinations and routes during their trip to minimize their expected travel costs. The probability that a driver is willing to switch to a new parking garage is taken to be proportional to the cost difference of the current parking destination and the new one. Microscopic simulation using SUMO and OmNet++ is designed to test the proposed dynamic parking and route guidance system. The simulation results show that with the proposed joint dynamic parking destination switching and dynamic traffic routing, the average overall cost in the network can be reduced. From the parking resources management point of view, parking garage occupancy can be more balanced across all the parking garages with the proposed system, which indicates that the system can help better coordinate available parking resources and avoid potential over-utilization or under-utilization of parking resources.