Human as a Service: Towards Resilient Parking Search System With Sensorless Sensing

The high demand for ubiquitous availability of reliable parking spaces in cities faces challenges on timely information sharing and low-cost infrastructure deployment. In this paper, we propose a mobile crowdsensing system, namely ParkHop, to aggregate on-street and roadside parking space information through sensorless sensing, and disseminate this information to urban drivers in a resilient manner. ParkHop targets special social groups that have stable work routines to serve as crowd workers. We propose a crowdsensing algorithm employing a joint estimator to process crowdsensed data, and evaluate the reliability of crowd workers based on the veracity of their answers to a series of control questions. In addition, the specific worker selection method to speed up the crowdsensing process and incentive scheme to achieve fair reward distribution have been carefully designed in ParkHop. Our system disseminates the availability of parking spaces and their up-to-date price information to drivers with on-demand needs via a publish-subscribe messaging pattern. The efficacy of ParkHop for aggregation and dissemination of parking space information has been evaluated in both real-world tests and simulations. Our results show the system is robust and agile enough to cope with different crowdsensing scenarios.