Civil Engineering

BarcelonaTech

TRANSPORTATION PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT

IN THE TERRITORY
M.Eng. in Civil Engineering
Course REPORTS 2014-2015 Group 20 (Q2)

A28. PARKING APPS

IRENE MARTNEZ VILLALONGA

_____________________
Barcelona, May 27, 2015

Civil Engineering
BarcelonaTech

1. INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES

Cities are locations with a high level concentration of economic activities and are complex
spatial structures that are supported by transport systems. In larger cities, the complexity and the
potential for disruptions are greater. The transport problems are related to urban areas and
happen when the diverse requirements of urban mobility are not satisfied. Congestion is one of
the most important transport problems in large cities; it is interrelated with parking because
looking for a parking space creates delays and affects local circulation. It is estimated that
cruising for spaces represents roughly 30% of the traffic. This issue has affected the parking
industry, where pricing is now seen as a mechanism for managing congestion.
That is why in recent years there has been a considerable growth in the demand for technology
for on-street parking: smart parking has become an obvious way of decreasing operations costs
and gaining profit through increased occupancy. Planning smart parking strategies can result in
huge advances and profit for cities; for instance congestion can be dramatically reduced by
incorporating technologies such as street sensors, real time way-finding systems and apps that
get drivers to their final destination without searching.
As it was said before, many smartphone applications have been launched with the aim of reduce
traffic congestion but also reduce driver frustration, fuel consumption and exhaust emissions. A
huge variety of them can be found depending on what kind of information or help the driver
needs: for example you can find the application Parker; it uses sensor-based smart parking
technology to help drivers find available spots in real time. Another type of app can be Orlando
parkIN that gives users a view of parking locations sorted by price and location. It also
integrates with Google Maps to provide directions based on current location.
The smart city (we can generalize for smart park) ecosystem is composed of 3 main
stakeholders: citizens, cities and utilities. Citizens enjoy smart services (these include smart
park) that improve their life in terms of health (less CO2 emissions) and economically. Then we
have the second stakeholder, the cities; where using smart services the city officials will be able
to monitor the environment in real time, to react immediately and in case of necessity to establish
automated control processes. The last one stakeholder are the utilities; they offer smart city
services using ICT infrastructure for prevention of resource disruptions or for fast maintenance
actions among others. There are more stakeholders like business owners, employees, property
owners and any other parties or groups with a direct interest in parking that should be taken into
account.
To find an optimal parking spot we have to define the users objective function; it combines
proximity to destination and parking cost and also ensures that the overall parking capacity is
efficiently used. At the k-th decision point, we define the objective function as:
J k = min
!

With the decision variables:

x!" =

x!" J!" (k)

!!(!)!(!) !!! (!)

0 if user i is not assigned to resource j

1 if user i is assigned to resource j

And with the user cost function:

J!" = !

M!" k
M!

+ 1 !

D!"
D!

Civil Engineering
BarcelonaTech

2. DECISION VARIABLES, TRADE-OFFS AND KPIs

A smart park application uses contextual modeling in order to predict the behavior in specific
conditions and combinations of them. The next variables can be combined in a model:
Total travel time
Walking distance to building entrances
Day of the week
Current events in the city
Parking conditions (safety, shade, etc.)
Network disruptions
Traffic searching for parking
Parking price
Variable pricing
Comparing to the conventional parking without the technology help, the advantage of the use of
park applications can be shown clearly: the main purpose of using park apps is to reduce traffic
congestion and pollution by getting the shortest vehicle kilometers of travel (time) in urban area
to get to the first choice parking space. Usually, the total travel time is easy to measure and it
can represent the meaning of vehicle kilometers of travel. Hence, it can represent a relevant
decision variable. On the other hand if we assume that drivers are homogeneous and rational, we
can suppose that they want to minimize their walking distances form where they park to their
destination building. So that, the walking distance to building entrances can be considered as an
important variable as well.
Regarding the trade-offs, parking apps put an interesting dilemma in front of us: we have to
decide if we want a very accurate system, very fast or making it widely usable. If we want a
very accurate system it will also be slower because of the computation of the models. In the
same line, if simpler methods are implemented this might lead to system being unreliable at
times. The three variables have to be combined, for instance if the extensive analysis about the
prediction of occupancy levels based on historic data might be run periodically on the back end
so as to determine certain coefficients denoting the expected occupancy levels based on time of
day events. This will lead to an easier computation and it will not putt additional load on users
smart phone.
Respecting the parking applications KPIs, there are many issues that play an important role in
the indicators. Some of them are:
Number of downloads: more downloads! more possibilities to have more active users.
Number of registered users: it represents how many users that downloaded the app are using it.
Positive reviews of the app: it can give an idea of the number of users that used the app and that
maybe will continue using it because they find it useful.
CO2 emissions: a decrease of the CO2 emissions can be related to the use of parking apps since
they can help to reduce traffic congestion.
Traffic congestion: less traffic congestion can mean that parking apps are being used, because,
as it was said before, they can reduce traffic congestion avoiding users to search for a space.

Civil Engineering
BarcelonaTech

3. METHODOLOGY / MODELING AND EXAMPLE(s)

As it was shown in the first chapter, the users objective function combines the variables of
proximity to destination and parking cost to find an optimal parking spot. In order to establish a
relationship between the variables, we first will define some parameters.
At the k-th decision point, the state of the allocation system (X(k)) is defined as:
= { , , }
Where W(k) shows that user i is in the Wait queue, R(k) shows that user i is in the Reserve
queue and P(k)={p1(k),,pN(k)} is a set describing the state of the j-th resource with pj(k)
denoting the number of free parking spaces at resource j, j=1,,N.
Another parameter to define is the state of the i-th user (Si(k)):
= { , , , ()}
Where zi(k) is the location of the user i, ri(k) is the total time that user i has spent in the
Reserve queue, i(k) is a feasible resource set for user i and qi(k) is the reservation status of
user i:
! =

To contribute to the determination of i(k) we impose a constraint that limits the set of feasible
resources. If the user is assigned a resource j located at yj, the mentioned constraint will be:
!" !
Where Dij = ||di yi||
The next parameter for user i is denoted by Mi. It is an upper bound on the cost this user is
willing to accept for having reserved and used a resource. The approach taken into account does
not depend on the specific pricing scheme used, but it will be assumed that each user cost is a
function of the total reservation time ri(k) and the travelling time from the user location at the kth
decision time (zi(k)) to a resource location yj. So that, we define the total expected cost for using
resource j, evaluated at the k-th decision time as:
!" ( ! , !" )
Where !" is the travelling time and depends on the distance to a resource location and also
on random traffic conditions. Now, we can establish another constraint:
!" ( ! , !" ) !
This contributes to limit the set of feasible resources.
With all the needed parameters defined, the objective function that has to be minimized at each
decision point. The cost function is formed by the next weighted sum:
3

Civil Engineering
BarcelonaTech

!" = !

!"
!"
+ 1 !
!
!

Where ! [0,1] the weight that reflects the relative importance assigned by the user between
cost and walking distance between the parking spot and his destination.
It is necessary to remember that the main aim of smart parking is to make allocations for the
greater possible number of users while achieving the minimum user cost defined by !" ().
Regarding to average driving distance, it can be clearly seen how smart parking reduces
travelling time compared to blind searching (without any kind of parking information) and
other similar strategies.

Figure 1: Traffic searching for parking. Comparison under different parking guidance strategies

We can also see how variable pricing affects to average driving distance as well:

Figure 2: Traffic searching for parking under different pricing schemes

Civil Engineering
BarcelonaTech

It can be clearly seen how smart parking leads to a reduction of the travelling time and it will
lead to less traffic congestion and CO2 emissions. The commented graphs are from a study of the
behavior of cars searching for parking in the city of San Francisco.
On the following bar chart it is shown how the implantation of smart parking systems generates
revenues all around the world:

Figure 3: Annual Smart parking systems revenue by region, world markets: 2015-2024

Regarding to the utility of parking apps, they are being used as smart parking tools in many cities
around the world. Some good examples are: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Stockholm,
Beijing, Shanghai, So Paulo, and the Netherlands. For instance, in Los Angeles, users can
access occupancy data to determine the availability of parking spaces and then pay for them with
their smart phones. Apart from producing environmental benefits, parking apps improve the
utilization of existing parking and leads to greater revenues for the administration or parking
owners (it depens on the case).
On the other hand, the Barcelona city council has developed an application (Apparkb) that helps
the user to pay for his/her parking in the green/blue zone without using the parking meter, but it
does not help the driver to find any spot. Hence, it does not give environmental benefits apart
from using less paper for the tickets and it does not induce a parking rotation system.

Civil Engineering
BarcelonaTech

4. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Parking reservation and guidance is an extension of traditional navigation services, ones that
drive users to their destination block, and also guides them to available parking spots closest to
their final destination. All of these services are likely to be fully integrated into a number of
online search, social networking and e-commerce platforms.
As cities evolve, the need to better manage parking will be growing. Researchers are beginning
to estimate the true costs of free parking, higher traffic congestion, higher emissions of
greenhouse gases in urban areas that contribute to global warming. Reducing parkings massive
geographical and environmental footprint is an important long-term objective, and costeffectively matching demand for parking with its infrastructure supply is one of the key
contributions of smart parking.
Finally, to help cities strive to solve the problem of mobility in the most congested urban areas,
large-scale implementation of smart parking will be an important key point for making cities
more sustainable. In the long run smart parking will be able to transform our urban landscapes,
making them more amenable to people rather tan cars. With the advent of smart parking and
more mobility alternatives, better use of existing parking will drive decreased demand for the
country parking space surplus, opening avenues for surface parking and changing the urban
distribution of cities re-greening the land to create or expand living space, businesses and
recreational areas.

REFERENCES
Daniel B. Work and Alexandre M. Bayen. Impacts of the mobile internet on transportation
cyberphysical systems: Traffic monitoring using smartphones. In National Workshop for
Research on High-Confidence Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems: Automotive, Aviation
and Rail, 2008.
Geng, Y., and Cassandras, C.G., A New Smart Parking System Based on Optimal Resource
Allocation and Reservations, Proc. of 14th IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conf., pp.
979-984, Nov. 2011.
Leephakpreeda T. Car-parking guidance with fuzzy knowledge-based decision making.
Building and Environment 42 (2007) 803809, 2007
Mischa Dohler, Ignasi Vilajosana, Xavi Vilajosana, Jordi LLosa. Smart Cities: An Action Plan.
Worldsensing, Barcelona, Spain; CTTC, Barcelona, Spain; UOC, Barcelona, Spain.
Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Claude Comtois, Brian Slack. The Geography of Transport Systems. New
York: Routledge (2013)
International Parking Institute: http://parking.org/
Navigant research smart parking systems: https://www.navigantresearch.com/
New Energy News: http://newenergynews.blogspot.com.es