Secure Smart Parking at James Madison University via the Cloud Environment (SPACE)

Parking at James Madison University has been a challenge for years. With the increase of enrollment, this continues to be a more difficult problem. Currently at JMU, a few parking garages (e.g. Champions Drive Parking Deck & Grace Street Parking Deck) have some capability of counting how many vehicles are entering or leaving the garage, but the technology has not been widely embraced across campus. JMU is in need of a smart system that allows a student/faculty/staff/visitor to know how many available parking spaces are in a particular lot at any given time. With this information, users are given a suggestion for a place to park. The JMU Secure Smart Parking via the Cloud Environment initiative aims to address this parking problem. Using a Radio-frequency identification scanner, our system is able to count the number of vehicles entering and leaving each parking lot on campus. The current decal that is provided to each vehicle will be replaced with a smart decal with an embedded tag inside of it. We also developed a secure, mobile-friendly web application and mobile apps (both on an iOS and Android platforms) that can inform the driver of the number of available spots in a desired parking lot. By harnessing the power of the MEAN stack (Mongo, Express, Angular, and Node) and cloud-based computing, the JMU community will gain a near real-time perspective of the parking situation on-campus.