Automated Parking System Using PLC Technology

Parking space is becoming a serious problem due to the day-by-day increase in number of vehicles on the road. Particularly, in cities with large population, or in places where sports or artistic events are scheduled, looking for parking space is a major problem and finding a parking spot can be a frustrating experience. In order to combat this problem, some parking lots have introduced sensors to detect when a car enters or leaves a parking lot in order to track capacity and alert drivers if they are full. This is a partial solution that allows drivers to determine if a parking lot has open parking spots, but not the exact location of those spots. In this paper, we present a prototype of smart parking system using wireless sensor technology and networks. Using a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), parking spot statuses (occupied or idle) are detected and transmitted to a database. This information then be accessed by users through website or mobile app (application) to receive real-time updates. This system should provide users with near instantaneous updates of available parking spots while the WSN allows for flexibility of sensor placement. With the successful implementation of smart parking, the economical and time costs associated with traffic jams, cost associated with wasted gas fuel, and time looking for an empty parking space that are caused by inefficient parking will be significant reduced.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Many cities have adopted minimum parking requirements, but there is relatively poor information about how parking infrastructure has grown. We estimate how parking has grown in Los Angeles County (CA) from 1900 to 2010 and how parking infrastructure evolves, affects urban form, and relates to changes in automobile travel using building and roadway growth models. We find that since 1975 the ratio of residential off-street parking spaces to automobiles in Los Angeles County is close to 1.0 and the greatest density of parking spaces is in the urban core, while most new growth in parking occurs outside of the core. In total, 14% of Los Angeles County's incorporated land is committed to parking. Uncertainty in our space inventory is attributed to our building growth model, on-street space length, and the assumption that parking spaces were created as per the requirements.Takeaway for practice: The continued use of minimum parking requirements is likely to encourage automobile use at a time when metropolitan areas are actively seeking to manage congestion and increase transit use, biking, and walking. Widely discussed ways to reform parking policies may be less than effective if planners do not consider the remaining incentives to auto use created by the existing parking infrastructure. Planners should encourage the conversion of existing parking facilities to alternative uses.

With the continuous acceleration of China’s modernization process, the number of private cars has increased sharply, and the traffic flow of various parking lots is increasing. The parking management of motor vehicles has become a problem of great concern to the society. In view of the shortage of parking spaces, the long time of manual fee collection, low efficiency and the inability to quickly find the reserved parking spaces in urban parking lots in China. At the same time, in large shopping malls, there is a common phenomenon that the parking range is single or the parking space is difficult to find, which makes the vehicles stay in the parking lot in a short time and cause congestion. For parking lot managers, it is difficult to timely regulate the parking lot through the existing traffic flow information of the parking lot, and it is impossible to determine the number of vacant parking spaces in the parking lot in real time. At the same time, The existing management system has problems such as low efficiency, poor scalability and less service content, which is difficult to solve in the face of emerging problems. Therefore, based on the above problems, this project designs an urban intelligent parking cloud platform based on wechat applet, which can distinguish users and administrators, select spare parking spaces, route navigation and time payment of parking fees for parking users, and the parking lot managers can understand the spare parking spaces and vehicle payment of the parking lot they manage, At the same time, it can detect the traffic flow through the traffic flow in a period of time and give early warning to prevent the accumulation of vehicles in the parking lot. Users and administrators can obtain more convenient and real-time information only through mobile phones, which solves the difficult problem of parking management in intelligent parking lot.

The major obstacles to teaching Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) is a variety of PLCs and the rapid pace of technological development with new models and innovations. Moreover, costs incurred in the setting up of comprehensive and modern PLC laboratory facilities, and in the required periodic updating of teaching material and equipment are, as a result, very high. After investigated the conception and features of PLC and embedded system, the development of the embedded PLC for teaching machatronics students is proposed in this paper with the seamless combination of the LabVIEW software and the ARM Microcontroller with the LabVIEW embedded module. The flexibility of the proposed PLC makes it relatively easy and less costly to teach the basic principle of different kinds of PLCs due to their variety and rapid change. The implementation of the embedded PLC is discussed and evaluated. The results of evaluation shows that embedded PLC can be taught in an uncomplicated manner.

Pasar Sayur Karangploso di Kabupaten Malang menghadapi kendala dengan ketersediaan tempat parkir yang tidak memadai. Fasilitas parkir yang disediakan oleh Pasar Karang Ploso tidak sebanding dengan keunggulan lain dari pasar tersebut. Tujuan dari studi ini adalah untuk menentukan karakteristik parkir, kebutuhan parkir, dan pengaturan parkir alternatif. Data yang digunakan adalah data primer dan data sekunder. Berdasarkan hasil dan diskusi, indeks parkir dan kebutuhan ruang parkir diperoleh sebagai berikut: indeks parkir sepeda motor rata-rata sebesar 29%, indeks parkir mobil sebesar 47%. Dari hasil analisis, diketahui bahwa nilai IP > 1 menunjukkan bahwa fasilitas parkir bermasalah di mana permintaan parkir melebihi kapasitas/jumlah lahan parkir kendaraan yang tidak teratur. Sementara itu, ruang unit rata-rata (SRP) untuk dua roda adalah 136 tempat parkir dan ruang unit rata-rata (SRP) untuk empat roda adalah 96 tempat parkir. Tempat parkir yang tersedia di Pasar Sayur Karangploso untuk dua roda adalah 84 tempat parkir dan untuk empat roda adalah 47. Kondisi ini menunjukkan fasilitas parkir yang tidak stabil. Penelitian ini menghasilkan rekomendasi pemetaan lahan parkir dan marka parkir yang disertai dengan ketegasan dan ketaatan petugas dan pengguna parkir dalam mematuhi hasil rekomendasi.

Nowadays, finding a place for vehicle’s parking space has become a big challenge especially, in downtown of metropolises. Parking places are as one of main part of the modern urban transportation system, having the crucial role of removing static traffic from streets, which can cause to reduce streets’ parking spots, improve vehicles movement and increase the width of streets indirectly. Allocations of public parking spaces have been done in traditional way by visiting the location until few years ago without considering all effective parameters in allocation of public parking spots. The only parameter that has been considered, being the price of land. Geographic Information System (GIS) takes into account a suitable system for specifying optimum location to develop the public parking space. Using the GIS has the merit of increasing accuracy in comparison with the traditional method. This research presents proper method for locating of public parking place by consideration all effective parameters and by using GIS. The effective parameters have been weighed by AHP method. Then these parameters have been combined by fuzzy algebraic sum. This method has been used for locating suitable parking spots in region1 of Tehran as the case study.

The described intelligent parking service is a part of an ITS (intelligent transportation system) in which parking facilities are conceived of in terms of various new functions which they can provide. This service does not simply manage the internal operations of a parking facility; rather, it is designed to be compatible with a wide range of aspects that are intertwined with parking facilities. One of the features of the system developed by NTT is a parking reservation service that allows drivers to reserve a parking spot through the Internet when a parking space is available. The system enables motorists to find available parking spaces at their destinations easily and quickly by using the Internet. When used together with a smart card, the system can provide the motorists with recognition and payment services. This paper depicts the service concept of intelligent parking reservation systems and overviews the prototype developed by NTT.

In the realm of smart cities, issues related to vehicle parking have increasingly contributed to traffic congestion, primarily due to drivers searching for vacant spots and the inefficient management by parking operators. Therefore, smart parking systems must continuously be enhanced with real-time models that can reflect the availability of parking spaces and improve the utilization of parking capacity, thereby addressing part of these challenges. This paper proposes a two-stage hybrid approach aimed at optimizing parking space reservations in smart parking systems. The model enables drivers to locate the most time-efficient parking spot within these systems. In the first stage, the parking space is evaluated within an environment defined by fixed capacity. In the second stage, the most suitable parking spot is made available through a hierarchical parking management system using a search-based method. The approach is grounded in Markov Chain modeling, which is employed to accurately estimate the number of vehicles requiring reservations. Underestimation of this figure results in insufficient demand adjustments, whereas overestimation leads to additional operational costs. Therefore, the proposed system uses Markov Chains for capacity forecasting and mathematical models to simulate the temporal movement of vehicles within the parking facility to determine the proportion of reserved versus regular parking spaces. This temporal analysis improves reservation predictions and yields an average occupancy rate of approximately 0.032, with 15 successful reservations recorded over a 24-hour period.

With the increasing population in urban areas, finding a vacant parking space has always been the biggest problem for drivers, which causes a series of issues such as energy waste and environmental pollution. Most outdoor parking lots cannot provide details of vacant parking spaces due to limited sensor technology in outdoor environments (i.e., poor resistance to external interference due to heat, light or signal noise). Although some studies are based on images captured by cameras, the existing vacancy detection methods using fixed-position surveillance cameras are not flexible and accurate enough for wide use. We propose an Inclined Bounding Box (IBB) method for detecting vacant parking spaces using aerial images. The IBB method takes advantage of the feature-description ability of deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to identify the status of parking spaces and develops an inclined bounding boxes calibration algorithm on the top layer of CNN architecture. The proposed IBB method can automatically identify parking spaces, locate vacant parking spaces with any direction and detect multiple parking spaces simultaneously. The experimental results show that the proposed IBB method is more accurate than the three counterpart methods.

A blockchain-enabled private parking space allocation with improved parking space utilization

The surge in roadway truck freight has intensified the difficulties faced by truck drivers in locating safe and legal parking spaces. Parking shortage on the highway system not only creates logistical challenges, but also has substantial economic implications. To help drivers make safer, more efficient parking decisions and better utilize existing truck parking facilities, Truck Parking Information Management Systems (TPIMS) have been deployed in several states to provide real-time parking information to truck drivers through various communication channels. This dissertation first presents an anomaly detection method to identify sensor failures by tracking structural changes in time series parking data. In addition, a data dashboard is developed to evaluate and visualize the performance of the TPIMS through multidimensional aggregation of parking flow data. It can be observed from the dashboard that after the implementation of TPIMS, the utilization among parking facilities along I80 is more evenly distributed. Such intuitive tools can help agencies evaluate the system performance and make informed decisions. Despite the availability of real-time utilization information provided by truck parking information and management systems, there remains a significant requirement for truck drivers to know the anticipated availability of parking spaces at their intended arrival time. The second part of this dissertation develops predictive models that aid truck drivers in making informed decisions regarding trip planning, specifically focusing on two scenarios: pre-trip planning and en-route decision-making. Several tree-based ensembled machine learning models and a recurrent neural network based architecture is developed to forecast the utilization of parking sites and the results show that the prediction can be achieved with small errors. Models with and without other input attributes (e.g., weather, truck volume data) are discussed and compared at different prediction horizon, which enables various levels of forecasting. The integration of long-term and short-term prediction models aligns more closely with drivers' travel planning tendencies and this will help build a more efficient planning and decision-making process, thus optimizing the transportation industry's overall performance. Finally, to address the issue that the reliability and accuracy will hinder the future adoption of the system, a novel approach to enhance TPIMS is discussed by utilizing image processing techniques. In particular, the state-of-the-art You Only Look Once (YOLO) v5 algorithm is used to detect the occupancy of truck parking sites. By comparing the image processing results with the sensor reported data, sensor fault can be detected. Accordingly, a real time reporting system is proposed to communicate sensor fault result to the system operators in a timely fashion. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system, and it also provides insights for the development and improvement of truck parking information and management systems.

Automation is a technology used to carry out work processes or procedures without human assistance. Greenhouse automation is carried out related to the many operational activities in the greenhouse that involve many human repetitive activities. Some of them are related to fertilizing, watering, spraying pesticides and others. In the current era of the industrial revolution 4.0, manual activities that use human labor began to diminish and were replaced with automated systems and devices in order to streamline the operation of a work field,. PLCs can be defined as a micro-computer based controllers that use instructions stored in memory that can be programmed to implement logic, sequencing, timing, counting and arithmetic functions through digital or analog input / output (I / O) modules, to control machines and processes. This PLC is commonly used in the industrial world as an automation tool for production machines. PLC can be implemented as an automation tool in a greenhouse in this case as an automatic watering system for plants. This research resulted in a prototype of an automatic watering system on a clock based and combined clock-sensor based greenhouse that can run simultaneously on the same PLC.

Finding a vacant parking space in outdoor parking lots is a daily concern of most vehicle drivers during rush hours, especially in the urban context. In this paper, an outdoor parking space vacancy detection system is proposed, using mobile devices to improve parking space searching experience for vehicle drivers by providing them with the location and occupancy information of parking spaces. The system uses state-of-the-art image recognition algorithm, namely Convolutional Neural Network with a Raspberry Pi to identify vacant parking spaces from a parking lot image retrieved in real time via an IP camera. A university parking lot has been chosen as the test bed to deploy the proposed system for real time parking space vacancy detection. An Android smartphone application called Driver App is developed to enable ubiquitous visualization of real time outdoor parking spaces occupancy information for vehicle drivers. Evaluation outcomes based on the responses to System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire revealed high usability of the Driver App as a tool that provides smart parking service to assist vehicle drivers in searching for a vacant parking space.

A machine learning and simulation-based dynamic parking choice model for airports

With the increase in population and economic development of modern society of world, more and more people have cars of their own. The result is that traffic jam is more often than ever before. What is worse, in the increasingly crowded cities is the possibility of not finding safe parking lot especially in such crowded areas which could be a frustrating experiment. As parking facilities grow large, drivers need advanced methods of parking to reduce inefficiencies in finding spaces. A solution to reduce the drivers' searching time for vacant car-park lots will greatly save time, reduce cost and improve the traffic flow in the car park areas. To this end, the researchers has created a web-based application (including PHP and MySQl server) which aims at providing its users (the drivers) several benefits-when they utilise it – such as provide real-time parking spot availability information in order to book a safe parking space any time and from any place, save them time and efforts, subscribe and pay electronically. In addition, the system allows parking owners and/or mangers to manage their own parking spaces bookings and subscriptions more efficiently.