An Automated Parking System

Abstract

Drivers become frustrated and got a challenging task when finding out a free and suitable parking area during rush hours. Traffic congestions will also get increased when drivers make loops to move through the road to find out a free parking area near the destination. This will cause accidents and waste the valuable time of drivers. To address all these issues developing a parking application to find out the nearby parking location areas will become a good solution. In Sri Lanka, now a days the government will allow drivers to park the vehicle on open street areas where the payment can be made on a parking meter machine which is monitored by a parking warden. This project will give an application solution to find out available parking slots on open parking areas near Colombo city limits. The process of finding free parking areas will be easy and fast for drivers by using this application. The aim of this project is to develop a web-based application and a mobile application, respectively for admin and for the driver and parking warden. The admin has the ability to manage the parking locations and wardens by assigning particular locations for the wardens through the web application. At the same time mobile application gives two user views for parking warden and driver. Parking warden can update the availability or unavailability of slots which are assigned for the warden. According to the availability of slot, they will show up in the driver’s application. Once driver opens the application, current location of the driver’s vehicle is tracked and available parking locations will appears on the map. Driver can get an idea about the details of parking location by selecting a particular location which gives location name and the number of available parking slots in that location. As a user can get a clear idea about how many slots are free out of all the available slots, since in a situation like moving into a location where having 2 free slots out of 5 available slots has a low probability of change getting lost of the free slot. As a solution for this, the driver’s application provides a function to view how many slots are free out of all available slots. As a future work location update will be automated as driver has to book a particular parking slot before enter to the location. And when a situation like a vehicle accidently park in a free slot without knowing, then it take the geo location of the parking slot and using sensors it will automatically update the slot availability in the system. Then the drivers who use the application will get more accurate results by automatically updating the free available parking slots in a particular location.