A Distributed Markovian Parking Assist System

This paper proposes a congestion balancing parking guidance system that suggests to a driver a sequence of streets to follow around the desired destination with the aim to reduce the total distance that is travelled while searching for a free parking spot. The system requires only limited infrastructure information, and neither requires parking spaces to be instrumented, nor vehicles to communicate with each other. Specifically, the system utilizes parking vacancy information on each street. The system also accounts for the added cost of not finding a free space, which is typically expressed as the additional distance that needs to be travelled to find an available parking spot. To avoid local congestion, different drivers respond to different suggestions based on a probability distribution that considers the total distance that needs to be travelled. A mobility simulator is used to model the searching behaviors of vehicles for parking spaces with and without the smart parking algorithm and experimental results are provided using the road network of the city of Dublin, Ireland.