Parking in a busy car park such as in the Melbourne International Airport and the Crown Casino is not an easy task. Sometimes during the peak hour, people may require a long time to seek for an available car space. Most of the time people are driving their cars round and round in some areas of the car park, whilst there are some available spaces on the other side of the car park. This is not only waste of the time, but it also lead to car accidents as people keep their eyes on exploring available car spaces, but not on the ongoing traffic in the car park. Therefore, Smart-Parking is one of the effective methods to solve these problems.

Smart-Parking consists of a PC-host and some wireless communication units depending on how many car spaces are in the car park. The functionality of Smart-Parking is to indicate the availability of car space in each parking zone. Sensors will be used in each car space in order to detect whether the space is occupied. For instance, Zone A has 8 parking spaces in total and only 2 cars are parked in this zone, the indicator in Zone A will show there are 6 parking spaces available. Furthermore, each parking space has a sign indicating whether it is available or being occupied. Finally, the wireless communication units will update the information in the PC-host such as the availability of each parking space.

Smart-Parking can also help the owner to maintain the car park easily as from the PC-host; the owner can see all the information for each parking space in each zone. The owner can also close the parking zone for special purposes such as VIP parking.

Smart-Parking is a user friendly program with inexpensive devices. Our goal for this project is to introduce this effective idea to every busy car park in order to give the most convenience to all drivers and keep the car parks zero accident.

Dr Hai Le Vu, Trickie Lai, Wilson Yuen