Parking Navigation for Alleviating Congestion in Multilevel Parking Facility

Finding a vacant parking space in a large crowded parking facility takes long time. In this paper, we propose a navigation method that minimizes the parking time based on collected real-time positional information of cars. In the proposed method, a central server in the parking facility collects the information and estimates the occupancy of each parking zone. Then, the server broadcasts the occupancy data to the cars in the parking facility. Each car then computes a parking route with the shortest expected parking waiting time and shows it to the driver. We conducted simulation-based evaluations of the proposed method using a realistic model based on trace data taken from a real parking facility. We confirmed that the proposed method reduced parking waiting time by 20%-70% even with low system penetration.