Smart Parking Systems by Micro I/O - Serviços de Eletrónica, Lda.

1. 1
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

3. 3
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.

4. 4
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
Devices
X X X X
ParkHelp X X
Siemens
X X
SiPark
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

9. 9
System Architecture
Vehicle
Detectors
Database and Application
Server
Controller
Authorized
User
Gateways
Sporadic
User
Ticketing
Machine
Fine
Candidate

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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, …