Introduction
In this modern community, people tend to work and consuming life patterns. Most of the population in Qatar uses their own car as a main way of transportation even with the existence of metro or buses. Therefore, parking areas are found everywhere. Nevertheless, all drivers in Qatar have a common complaint that bothers them all, which is losing much time to find a parking lot and maybe not finding one in the first place. Hence, effective solutions to this issue must be found as some individuals and companies already tried and produced some non-effective solutions that did no good to the issue. so here comes the role of the project of the smart parking system. The system aims mainly to achieve full utilization of the resources alongside the customer resources as well (parking spaces, time, feasibility, etc…). Moreover, using the internet of things to design the parking allows to proceed through daily parking of the user process whether at work or shopping malls with all easiness and joy.
Aims And Objectives
The main goal of this project is to develop a smart parking system to collect information about the number of available parking lots in a parking zone for specific buildings as well as the locations of the available parking lots within a given parking zone. By using IoT mobile application, users will be able to book a parking lot, it also allows payment through the application to ease the user’s experience.. And therefore, the objectives of this project are to design and implement a prototype of an automated car parking system, and to learn how to control the prototype system for automated parking process, also, to know about how to program Arduino and make it works on any system (specifically this program system). Moreover, in order to fully utilize the IoT experience for the user, it is one of the main goals of this project to provide a web application for parking vehicles which can book a parking lot while the user is at home or elsewhere before going to their destination, also adding a payment system within this application to calculate and charge fees from the user.
High-level System Design
The first thing in this system is that the user needs to reserve a parking space by using the application provided, as it will ask for the car plate number and the phone number as well so it can send a message for that person with confirmation of the reservation. Then, when the driver goes to the parking gate, the RFID will read the car RFID tag. The system will check if it is already reserved for it and then the gate will open, however, if the driver did not reserve through the application the gate will not open. Thereafter, when the car is leaving the parking lot, the system will make an update as the sensor will turn off the led which means the parking is now empty. And when the car is leaving the parking, before the exit gate there is another RFID reader which will read the leaving user’s tag and sends the data to the system, which will check how long the car parked there to send the message with fees to be charged anytime through this application
Testing
Conclusions
At the end of this project, it is obviously shown that there are many benefits to both the users and the admins in the case of using a smart parking system in their facilities. Many people have been arguing whether this project has much use before trying it with their own or even seeing its benefit on the community. However, there is much difference in the user daily life as using a smart system fills all the missing gaps in this daily routine, not to mention organizing all the heavy traffic inside such small area, it also does many other tasks in order to fulfil the user’s needs and demands and make it a fun experience as well. Hence, since using such a smart parking system area organizes and enhances the quality of service in all places (work, malls, hospitals), this in return will lead to a general satisfaction condition among users, which of course will reflect in their environment wither it is a work environment (by achieving more productivity rates from employees) or it is a consumption-based environment (by opening their client appetite towards buying). In anyhow, applying the smart solutions always relief everyone from that extra burden of daily stress and anxiety they carry all time and makes everyone’s life easier.