Cost and Time-Integrated Road-to-Park Cruising Prevention Scheme in Smart Transportation

Vehicle cruising for a destination-nearby parking lot has been a problem to drivers in cities. This problem causes drivers to consume unexpected time and resources to compete for a parking lot. Conventional parking schemes are in place to predict or reserve the parking spaces. Some of these schemes optimize the total cost only for locating parking spaces and road traffic condition is usually ignored. In this investigation, key road traffic conditions, such as vehicle queueing at the intersection of roads and parking fee information, are considered since they influence time and cost in the parking process. As such, a new comprehensive parking scheme is needed in place to assist drivers to identify the appropriate parking lot, estimate the transportation time to reach the parking lot, as well as the parking expenses. In essence, the total journey time and the total cost are important factors. However, former research lacked a harmonious consideration of these two factors. In this paper, a new parking model (PM) is developed for a holistic optimization of time and cost. The performance is measured by a newly defined indicator, referred to as a figure of merit, which is a fusion of time and cost. The analysis reveals that the incorporation of PM improves the performance by 24% ~43%.