Optimal Parking Slots Reservation and Allocation Problem for Periodic Parking Platforms with Preference Constraints

Abstract

Various solutions, such as parking reservation systems, have been proposed to alleviate the difficulty in finding parking slots. In such systems, parking requests are submitted in advance by drivers, and the systems will reserve appropriate parking spots for drivers if their requests are accepted. However, the parking slots may be allocated unreasonably, which may lead to a waste of space and time resources. In addition, there is a game relationship between operator’s profit (OP) and users’ benefits (UB), which may affect the sustainable development of the system, if balanced improperly. Given the drivers’ arrival and departure time and their parking preference, the paper proposes a periodic reservation and allocation mode (PRAM) and establishes a dual-objective binary integer linear model to solve the reservation and allocation problem. The model aims to maximize the comprehensive benefits of the operator and users and to take full advantage of parking resources. We proposed a TOPSIS-SA algorithm (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution and Simulated Annealing algorithm) to solve our model. Numerical experiments show that our model performs better than the baseline models on all performance metrics such as total operating profit, users’ average walking distance, acceptance rate, and utilization of parking slots.