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Using Wireless Communications to support Street Parking Management

AmIES’2013, Berlin, 19-20 Sept 2013

José A. Fonseca*, Rui Rebelo**, Daniel Silva**, Andreia Abreu**

* Instituto de Telecomunicações, Aveiro** Micro I/O Lda

Micro I/O has been funded by QREN under project CONCEÇÃO E DESENVOLVIMENTO DE SISTEMA DE CONTROLO DE ESTACIONAMENTO INTELIGENTE (SI I&DT nº 30161, Janeiro 2013)

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Outline

1. Motivation

2. State of the Art

3. Functionalities

4. System Architecture

5. The Vehicle Sensor/Detector

6. Sensor Assessment and Pilot Field Operation Test

7. Conclusions and Work in Progress

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Motivation

Severe problem with traffic congestion in city centers.

Severe problem with parking

Adoption of systems to help finding vacant places in malls.

Impressive data concerning circulation to find a place:

– in one business district of Los Angeles vehicles searching for parking created an equivalence of 38 trips around the world, produced 730 tons of carbon dioxide, and burned around 180,000 liters of gasoline in one year.

Micro I/O has a successful project related with mobility –BikeEmotion®.

Inst. Telecomunicações works with Brisa, highway conces-sionary in vehicular communications and payment systems.

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State of the Art

Several commercial systems:

– Intelimotion, Portugal;

– ParkHelp and Circontrol, Spain;

– ParkAssist and Intelligent Devices; EUA

– Siemens, Germany.

– Micro I/O has a successful project related with mobility –BikeEmotion®.

Some almost complete academic trials:

– PGS system, Inform. and Comm. University de Daejong, Korea;

– SPARK system, Centre Develop. of Advanced Computing in India;

– Shenzen Institute of Advanced Technology, China.

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State of the Art

Communications Sensors

Cabled Wireless Ultrasound Magnetic Optical

Intelimotion X X

Circontrol X X

Intelligent

DevicesX X X X

ParkHelp X X

Siemens

SiParkX X

Parkassist X X

PGS X X

SPARK X X

Shenzen X X

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State of the Art

Several partial sudies:

– “SmartParking: A Secure and Intelligent Parking System.”, IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine, 2011.

– “Network structure and comm. design of parking lot based on ZigBee technique”, 7th Int. Forum Strategic Tech. (IFOST), 2012.

– “Different wireless technologies for the remote payment of street car parks”, Int. Conf. on Information Society (i-Society), 2012.

– “PhonePark: Street Parking Using Mobile Phones”, Proc. IEEE 13th Int. Conf. on Mobile Data Management (MDM), 2012.

– “Detection of Parked Vehicles Using Spatiotemporal Maps”, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2011.

– “A Hierarchical Bayesian Generation Framework for Vacant Parking Space Detection.” IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 010.

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Functionalities

Payment process,

Deployment,

Detection of free places for parking,

Abuse control,

Parking management.

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System Architecture

System nodes:– Vehicle Sensor/detector

– Authorized vehicle tag

– Gateway

– Mobile phone applications: payment, free place location, controller support

Server side applications & data

– Registered user database.

– Management & maintenance database.

– Abuse control optimization.

– Payment

– Mobility control and data collection

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System Architecture

VehicleDetectors

Database and ApplicationServer

Controller

AuthorizedUser

Gateways

TicketingMachine

SporadicUser

FineCandidate

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The Vehicle Sensor/Detector

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The Vehicle Sensor/Detector

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The Vehicle Sensor/Detector

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The Vehicle Sensor/Detector

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Sensor/Detector Assessment

A large set of tests have been performed acquiring and analyzing sensor data:

– With different positions of the sensor in the road.

– With different maneuvers of the car.

– With different car speeds and different cars.

– With cars in the adjacent parking spots.

– With different configurations of parking spots (along the road or perpendicular to the road).

– With other vehicles/devices: bicycle and hand carrying car!

Vehicles detected and cars not confused with other vehicl.

Maybe it is possible to detect a car profile but it depends from the car load (BRISA & ISEL on-going project).

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Sensor/Detector Assessment

Output from the sensor during parking followed by unparking

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Field Operation Test in Lisbon

Large call for proposals in Lisbon to monitor trucks and other goods transportation vehicles:

– Around 1500 large parking places.

– Easier because each zone has less than 6 parking spots.

– Automatic vehicle identification with 1 minute timing granularity.

– The idea is to authorize a certain amount of time and charge for the excess with direct invoice to transportation companies or similar identified users.

A testing site with 2 sets of parking spots with 10 places each is under evaluation now.

A star architecture for the wireless communication from detectors to the base station has been adopted in this case.

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Field Operation Test in Lisbon

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Conclusions and On-Going Work

Wireless communications open new possibilities in smart parking facilities.

It is viable technically and economically to instal a detector for each parking place.

Magnetic sensors seem to fit – not invasive as cameras.

Multimodal payment methods can be used to cope with different users culture, habits, beliefs, likes, …

Ongoing work includes:

– Improving the detectors communication protocol.

– Improving energy usage or studying alternative solutions.

– Developing algorithms to optimize controller displacement.

– Finishing the server applications, sensor fusion, …