Vehicle Sensor Aggregation for Urban Parking Availability Mapping
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing parking systems in urban areas face significant challenges in efficiently managing parking space availability, leading to economic and ecological losses due to congestion and inefficiencies, with current sensor-based solutions incurring high installation and operational costs.
Innovation Solution
A vehicular information system that collects and aggregates sensor data from vehicles to provide approximate parking statistics, including counts and historical averages, which are used to generate parking space maps and adjust prices dynamically, improving decision-making for municipalities, travelers, and parking garages.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If fixed sensors are installed in the ground or on parking meters to monitor parking spot availability, then real-time parking information can be obtained, but installation and operational costs increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The system enables vehicles to autonomously detect and report their own parking status using onboard sensors, eliminating the need for municipal installation of fixed infrastructure. Each vehicle serves itself by collecting and transmitting parking data, transforming the monitoring task from a centralized expensive infrastructure problem into a distributed self-service mechanism
Solution Approach 2:
A centralized server acts as an intermediary that aggregates parking data from multiple vehicles, processes the information, and generates comprehensive parking statistics. This mediator consolidates the distributed data from individual vehicles into useful city-wide parking information without requiring physical sensors at every parking location
2Ease of manufacture
If vehicle-mounted sensors are used to collect parking data, then infrastructure costs are reduced, but individual vehicle data lacks comprehensive coverage
Solution Approach 1:
The system merges data from multiple individual vehicle sensors into a unified comprehensive dataset. By combining observations from numerous vehicles traversing different areas, the system achieves complete spatial coverage that no single vehicle could obtain alone, transforming individual limited data into collective comprehensive information
Solution Approach 2:
The parking monitoring system achieves multi-functionality by serving multiple purposes: it provides real-time parking availability information to drivers, generates statistical data for urban planning, enables dynamic pricing strategies, and supports enforcement operations, all through the same vehicle-mounted sensor network
Data Source
AI summary
Disclosed is a method and system that receives sensor information from each of a plurality of sensors. Each sensor in the plurality is associated with a vehicle. The sensor information includes location coordinates of each vehicle in the plurality. The sensor information associated with each vehicle in the plurality then is translated to parking statistics information. In one embodiment, the translation is based on an aggregate of sensor information corresponding to the plurality of vehicles. The system then communicates parking statistics information to the vehicle.