Smart Parking Recommender Mobile Application

Abstract

Organized parking is an important aspect of living amongst each other in a society. Most people identify parking as a cumbersome activity because there is typically a lot of stress involved when interpreting vague parking rules. However, parking is a necessary evil as it keeps matters fair and civilized. The necessity for parking generates a huge amount of revenue for the economy. The parking industry consists of a multitude of different aspects such as parking lot management, parking garage construction and management, and valet parking services. The market size for parking measured in revenue is estimated to be around 8.2 billion. Parking is an essential aspect of transportation as regulations and policies are necessary to improve transportation efficiency. As more people move into an area, the more the parking industry is expected to grow. With universities always striving to recruit new students, an enormous parking infrastructure is needed to maintain the peace and stability on campus. Unfortunately, this often comes with painfully rigid administration that often inconveniences the daily lives of students. Parking becomes a headache to many college students due to the increasing number of students, but stagnant number of parking spaces. This event drives down the availability of parking spaces and takes away from students’ learning experience as they often have to plan hours ahead to make it to class. The smart parking application aims to provide its users with a more convenient parking experience over its nonusers. The application only supports parking at James Madison University at the current moment, but the goal is to expand to all universities. The core premise on how this application is able to provide this functionality is by analyzing the trends in parking spot occupancy and time. James Madison University installed sensors in their parking spaces that are able to track if it is occupied at all times of the day. The parking status is updated live on the official university website. The smart parking application utilizes the API that tracks these updates and observes for patterns to provide the user the most optimal place to park. The tech stack for the smart parking application will be the MERN stack with MongoDB Atlas for real-time data utilization. MongoDB is chosen because of its malleable document structure. The backend is an Express/Node.js server with Python for the machine learning program. The frontend is a React Native iOS/Android application that fetches data from the API, and uses several component libraries for UI design, including Lottie, RNUI, and React Native Map. The app allows any person to use it without requiring them to create an account. The purpose of the application is to provide users an advantage in parking over non users. The reasoning behind this is if everyone used the application to get the best parking spaces, then there would be a paradoxical effect and then no one could get the best parking spaces. The main goal here is to give the users of the application a more convenient parking solution, but resolving the lack of parking spaces is a potential issue to tackle in the future.