iParker—A New Smart Car-Parking System Based on Dynamic Resource Allocation and Pricing

Abstract— Parking in major cities, particularly with dense traffic, directly effects the traffic flow and people’s life. We introduce a new smart parking system that is based on intelligent resource allocation, reservation, and pricing. The proposed system solves the current parking problems by offering guaranteed parking reservations with the lowest possible cost and searching time for drivers and the highest revenue and resource utilization for parking managers. New fair pricing policies are also proposed that can be implemented in practice. The new system is based on mathematical modeling using mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) with the objective of minimizing the total monetary cost for the drivers and maximizing the utilization of parking resources. According to historical data, the prices are increased and decreased proportional to the expected utilization. Although dynamically changing parking prices shall balance the supply and demand for parking and increase overall utilization, it is based on historical data and statistics which may not be accurate enough to have the proper effect. It was allowed, fixed price was used and revenue was not taken into account and only a single choice of destination was considered. Whereas our model allows a driver to reserve a parking space for any time in future, the revenue is considered and new pricing models are introduced. In addition, a parking solution with their individual journey planners is proposed. < final year projects >