A Context-Aware Smart Parking System

Finding a parking slot is a process very stressful for a person who would like to reach a specific place. It could be considered also expensive since it often causes an increasing of traffic with a consequent increase of pollution. In this paper, we present a smart parking system that helps users to reach a free parking slot, in a small area or a city, using context-aware information to help in the process. The proposed solution does not require an existing infrastructure of sensors spread in parking areas since it exploits the potential of modern smartphones with their capability of recognizing user activity and position. This solution introduces an algorithm which compares routes of different drivers to find relations among them. A mechanism based on Bluetooth Low Energy Advertising (BLE Advertising) is then adopted to detect passengers and reduce the bias that would be introduced by the arrival of multiple users in the same parking area. To test the system we developed an application prototype that enables the gathering of contextual information and displays through a map an approximate distribution of free parking areas close to the user's position. A series of tests were performed to evaluate the system to estimate the advantages of a sensors-less architecture.