Smart campus parking – parking made easy

Abstract

The number of users of the parking lots from the campus of the Polytechnic of Leiria, a higher education institution in Portugal, has been increasing each year. It is becoming a major concern to the organization to address the high demand for a free parking spot on campus. In order to ease this problem, this paper proposes the design of a smart parking system that can help users to easily find a free parking spot, using an integrated system that includes sensors and a mobile application. The system is based on the information about the occupation status of parking lots generated by parking sensors. This information is available in the mobile application that consumes a REST webservice and is presented to end-users, thus contributing to the decrease of time wasted on the quest of finding a free spot. The software architecture consists on a set of decoupled modules that compute and share the information generated by sensors. This architectural approach is noteworthy because it maximizes the system scalability and responsiveness to change. It allows the system to expand with the integration of new applications and perform updates on the existing ones, without an overall impact on the operations of the other system modules.