Increasing the Capacity for Automated Valet Parking Using Variable Spot Width

Automated vehicles allow to adapt new parking concepts, which have the potential to increase the parking capacity significantly. Thereby, the abilities to assign optimal parking spaces to the vehicles and to perform shunting operations are systematically utilised. In this paper, the typical parking order with spots of constant width is replaced by a loose parking order with variable width. In this way, the width of each individual vehicle can be considered, which leads to an improved utilisation of the available space. Despite this improvement, first simulation studies without shunting operations under realistic conditions did not show the expected results. Therefore, an optimum strategy for shunting operations is deployed. As the optimisation is computationally challenging, a heuristic method is proposed which shows similar results as the optimal solution. A substantial increase in the parking capacity of up to 12% for a commercial parking garage is achieved, where no constructional modifications are necessary.