A Crowdsourcing Framework for Reporting Available Parking Spots in Urban Areas

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 incentivisation 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 framework for reporting and allocating available free parking spots in an urban traffic network. The framework provides 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 (i.e., reported from and to the users) using appropriate coloring schemes with varied opacity levels. The proposed crowdsourcing framework is part of the platform developed in the context of the national research project Social Park.