A Live Smart Parking Demonstrator: Architecture, Data Flows, and Deployment

Abstract

Smart Parking is essential for any future smart cities due to the tremendous growth of the car fleet. Such infrastructures require a certain amount of equipment. Indeed, smart parking integrates a lot of actors, to manage the parking its equipment must be managed accordingly. Here, is proposed a distributed architecture to manage them by collecting efficiently their data. Two types of data relating to the parking must be collected: those coming from the deployed equipment in the parking and those coming from the internet due to remote users. Thus, a system of two main servers based on the multi-agent concept is proposed. This system manages the parking platform. The first server is dedicated to the parking equipment data collection (Processing Server–PS). The second server (Processing Web Server–PWS) collects the users’ online data such as reservation, and it is responsible for pricing policies, and receive post-processed data from the Processing Server. The parking equipment integrates a lot of commercial solutions, an intelligent multi-platform application based on this two server philosophy is developed and can be used for parking operation by users and parking managers. The flowcharts of the agents from the two mains servers are presented. These flowcharts are currently used in our demonstrator and still under improvements. Here, we present the architecture (hardware and software) of our smart parking demonstrator developed by our department and suitable for the experimentation of our future work related to this hot topic.