A Real-Time Reservation Service for Smart Parking System

To deal with parking problems in big cities, smart parking systems are launched by public or private organizations. This study proposes a real-time parking reservation service to minimize the total travel cost of all users. A mixed-integer programming model is formulated to allocate slots and schedule drivers' travel plans efficiently. The allocation and scheduling model can improve the parking experiences of drivers and increase the utilization of parking slots, compared with traditional parking reservation services without scheduling module. We then establish an experiment setting to simulate the parking demand from different types of drivers (commuters and visitors) in a central business district. We investigate supplying policies of parking slots to satisfy the parking demand during a whole day with considering different performance metrics. The experiment results give insights and guidelines for practical parking management organizations.