Roadside Parking Space Search and Assistance System for Modern Cities

Abstract

People waste a lot of time in searching for a roadside parking space, especially in busy areas like the marketplace. In addition to wastage of time, it causes extra congestion on the road as vehicles which were supposed to be parked are still roaming on the roads, consequently extra pollution, and most importantly stress and inconvenience to the driver. To address these issues, a framework is proposed to provide assistance to drivers in searching for a roadside parking place. Instead of providing direction to one parking area, which is not feasible as roadside parking areas do not have reservation facilities, this framework will suggest a series of options (basically routes) for the driver to follow. The approach uses ant colony optimization to tackle the computationally challenging task. The algorithm tries to suggest a route which is not only close to the drivers location but also avoids areas of congestion if possible. The proposed approach is simulated using SUMO simulator suite. The proposed routing approach has been compared with the random routing approach using different metrics and the results show that the proposed approach performs significantly better than the random approach.