A Novel Parking Management System, for Smart Cities, to save Fuel, Time, and Money

In modern society, we often spend 5 to 10 minutes trying to find a spot in a parking garage. Parking garages are commonplace, but they are extremely inefficient. According to a study done by Inrix, the authority on vehicles and transportation, over 70 billion dollars are wasted every year searching for parking. In that process, we waste 3.6 billion hours of time and 1.7 billion gallons of fuel. That is a lot of wasted resource. In this project, I propose a novel parking management system, which consists of hardware and software modules. On the hardware side, Raspberry Pi device is used along with few other parts like sensors and cameras. On the software side, python modules are implemented with efficient data-management. To test the system, I have modeled different possible actions of the drivers and ensured that the proposed parking system performs perfectly. I have outlined three core situations. First one is when drivers park correctly, the second one has error-correction, and the third one requires error correction involving multiple cars. This system can be used in any large parking structure in the modern smart cities. Some examples are hospitals, companies, downtown, airports, malls, events etc. The system is affordable, as the hardware-cost is about $200 for each parking spot.