An IoT Based Car Parking System for Supermarkets

One of the challenge faced by people living in metropolitan cities of India is parking of cars at supermarkets, shops, theater, hotels, stadiums etc. This problem becomes more serious during weekends and holidays. Solutions provided in earlier work includes, image processing based automatic number plate recognition system, use of RFID tags, QR code, vehicle tracking etc. These solutions are not feasible to implement as they suffer from security as well as implementation challenges or are not cost effective. In this paper, an IoT based solution for parking of cars at supermarkets is presented using NodeMCU ESP8266. Two ultrasonic sensors are placed in each parking slot for checking the car occupancy. An android mobile app is developed which is used for the purpose of displaying available slots, dynamic fare and booking of available slot for the user selected time period. User information is collected, once a particular slot is chosen by the user. A code is generated for each booking and the same is used for validation at the entrance gate of the parking. Complete details are stored on the cloud. The prototype of the system has been developed and tested for booking slot using ESP8266 and google firebase as cloud hosting service. We found that above system is more efficient and economical for booking of parking slots at supermarkets.