A Non-Sensor Solution for Effective and Inexpensive Parking Management: Payment, Reservation, and Dynamic Pricing

Team: Sean Qian (PI, CMU), Shuguan Yang (CMU)
Funding source: NSF Award
Start/End time: 2017-NA

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The current on-street parking system has long been inefficient for management. Information regarding occupancies and violations are usually difficult to acquire, although various sensing technologies have been utilized in modern on-street parking management systems. Relatively low reliability of sensors and the high expenses of installing and maintaining parking sensors make it not scalable. Moreover, parking rates for on-street parking is usually fixed, which is essentially inefficient, as the actual parking demand is fluctuating day to day. A flexible and dynamic price can increase the overall usage of parking resources in an efficient way.

In this project, a non-sensor based parking management system is proposed. Comparing to traditional on-street parking management schemes, the proposed system is more advantageous in the following ways: (1) Providing better estimates for real-time parking occupancy without deploying sensors; (2) Applying dynamic parking rates based on both demand and supply. (3) Offering parking reservations via mobile or web; (4) Enabling convenience and straightforward parking payment; and (5) Allowing cheap and efficient parking enforcement.