FedPark: A Federated Learning Crowdsensing Solution for On-Street Parking Availability

Locating available on-street parking in busy urban areas is often frustrating and time-consuming, particularly during peak hours. Inefficient parking searches contribute to traffic congestion, increased fuel consumption, and higher carbon emissions, making real-time parking availability information essential for smart urban mobility. This paper presents FedPark, a privacy-preserving crowdsensing system that leverages drivers’ smartphone sensors to monitor parking space occupancy. FedPark employs a Federated Learning (FL) algorithm, enabling the creation of a global model that aggregates insights from multiple local models maintained on individual drivers’ devices. Each local model learns from a user’s driving patterns without sharing personal data, ensuring enhanced privacy protection. Instead of transmitting raw data, only model updates are shared, reducing communication overhead and security risks. FedPark is evaluated under different urban conditions such as different numbers of drivers and destinations. The evaluation demonstrates that FedPark achieves a high level of accuracy at 98.31%, recall of 98.31%, precision of 98.34%, and an F1-score of 98.31% comparable to centralized machine learning models, including XGBoost, Random Forest, CatBoost, CNN, and ensemble classifiers while preserving driver privacy.