Evaluating the social benefit of a negotiation-based parking allocation

Abstract

Smart parking systems usually support drivers to select parking spaces according to their preferences among competitive alternatives, which are well known in advance to the decision maker, but without considering also the needs of a city. In this paper a decision support system for selecting and reserving optimal parking spaces to drivers is presented, where the concept of optimality is related to the city social welfare including the level of satisfaction of both drivers and the city. It relies on an automated software agent negotiation to accommodate the different needs coming from the different actors involved in the parking allocation process. A simulator of such a system is evaluated with respect to a case of complete information sharing among agents, and a case of no shared information. Different metrics to evaluate the social benefit of the parking allocation in terms of both agents utilities, and allocation efficiency are considered.