Hybrid spatial–temporal graph convolutional networks for on-street parking availability prediction

Abstract

With the development of sensors and of the Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities can provide people with a variety of information for a more convenient life. Effective on-street parking availability prediction can improve parking efficiency and, at times, alleviate city congestion. Conventional methods of parking availability prediction often do not consider the spatial–temporal features of parking duration distributions. To this end, we propose a parking space prediction scheme called the hybrid spatial–temporal graph convolution networks (HST-GCNs). We use graph convolutional networks and gated linear units (GLUs) with a 1D convolutional neural network to obtain the spatial features and the temporal features, respectively. Then, we construct a spatial–temporal convolutional block to obtain the instantaneous spatial–temporal correlations. Based on the similarity of the parking duration distributions, we propose an attention mechanism called dist Att to measure the similarity of parking duration distributions. Through the dist Att mechanism, we add the long-term spatial– temporal correlations to our spatial–temporal convolutional block, and thus, we can capture complex hybrid spatial–temporal correlations to achieve a higher accuracy of parking availability prediction. Based on real-world datasets, we compare the proposed scheme with the benchmark models. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme has the best performance in predicting the parking occupancy rate.