An Innovative Mobile Application for Booking Parking Spots

Given the concentration of the majority of population in urban areas and the lack of available public space, car parking has evolved as a major problem for big cities in recent years. To address the issue, several approaches have been proposed including incentivization mechanisms for increasing the use of public transport, carpooling for reducing the number of vehicles in the urban traffic network and crowdsourcing for reporting in real-time available free parking spots in the network. Towards the last direction, in this paper we introduce a novel crowdsourcing mobile application for reporting and allocating available free parking spots in an urban traffic network. The mobile application is based on a framework providing the necessary services for a user to report an available free parking spot discovered in the network, it distributes in real-time to all registered users the information about all available free parking spots in the whole network, as well as it evaluates the credibility of the received crowdsourcing information using an advanced probabilistic algorithm. Moreover, the proposed framework places special emphasis on the visualization of the parking availability using appropriate coloring schemes with varied opacity levels. The mobile application encapsulates diverging services to provide a complete solution to the end user of the city.