Abstract
To alleviate the congestion caused by searching for parking, internet- or smartphone-based parking reservation systems have been deployed in major cities. We develop algorithms to provide optimal guidance to individual drivers on where to search for or reserve parking and how to navigate the traffic while searching for parking, a problem which has yet to be addressed in the literature. Drivers holding a reservation pay a holding cost per unit time until they park, so it is often suboptimal to reserve parking before departing. We formulate a Markov decision process to decide both where to attempt to reserve parking and which route to take. The optimal parking space to reserve changes as the driver travels through the network. Results on the downtown Austin network show that reserving parking affects route choice and reduces cruising for parking compared to not reserving parking. Our model and solution algorithm could be integrated with GPS navigation systems to provide guidance to individual drivers on optimal navigation and use of parking reservation systems.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Axhausen K, Polak J, Boltze M, Puzicha J (1994) Effectiveness of the parking guidance information system in Frankfurt am Main. Traffic Eng+ Control 35(5):304–9
Bertsekas DP (2012) Dynamic programming and optimal control, vol 2. MA, Athena Scientific Belmont
Boyles S, Tang S, Unnikrishnan A (2015) Parking search equilibrium on a network. Transp Res B Methodol 81:390–409
Chen Z, Yin Y, He F, Lin JL (2015) Parking reservation for managing downtown curbside parking. Transp Res Record: J Transp Res Board 2498:12–18
Chen Z, Xu Z, Zangui M, Yin Y (2016) Analysis of advanced management of curbside parking. Transp Res Record: J Transp Res Board 2567:57–66
Chiu Y-C, Bottom J, Mahut M, Paz A, Balakrishna R, Waller T, Hicks J. (2011) Dynamic traffic assignment: a primer. Transportation Research E-Circular (E–C153)
Delot T, Cenerario N, Ilarri S, Lecomte S (2009) A cooperative reservation protocol for parking spaces in vehicular ad hoc networks. In: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on mobile technology, application & systems. ACM, p 30
Delot T, Ilarri S, Lecomte S, Cenerario N (2013) Sharing with caution: managing parking spaces in vehicular networks. Mob Inf Syst 9(1):69–98
Hashimoto S, Kanamori R, Ito T (2013) Auction-based parking reservation system with electricity trading. In: 2013 IEEE 15th conference on business informatics (CBI). IEEE, pp 33–40
He F, Yin Y, Chen Z, Zhou J (2015) Pricing of parking games with atomic players. Transp Res B Methodol 73:1–12
Inaba K, Shibui M, Naganawa T, Ogiwara M, Yoshikai N (2001) Intelligent parking reservation service on the internet. In: 2001 Symposium on applications and the internet workshops, 2001. Proceedings. IEEE, pp 159–164
Kaspi M, Raviv T, Tzur M (2014) Parking reservation policies in one-way vehicle sharing systems. Transp Res B Methodol 62:35–50
Kaspi M, Raviv T, Tzur M, Galili H (2016) Regulating vehicle sharing systems through parking reservation policies: analysis and performance bounds. Eur J Oper Res 251(3):969–987
Levin MW, Pool M, Owens T, Juri NR, Waller ST (2014) Improving the convergence of simulation-based dynamic traffic assignment methodologies. Netw Spatial Econ, 1–22
Liu Y, Nie YM (2011) Morning commute problem considering route choice, user heterogeneity and alternative system optima. Transp Res Part B Methodol 45 (4):619–642
Liu W, Yang H, Yin Y (2014a) Expirable parking reservations for managing morning commute with parking space constraints. Transp Res Part C: Emerg Technol 44:185–201
Liu W, Yang H, Yin Y, Zhang F (2014b) A novel permit scheme for managing parking competition and bottleneck congestion. Transp Res Part C: Emerg Technol 44:265–281
Mahmud S, Khan G, Rahman M, Zafar H, et al. (2013) A survey of intelligent car parking system. J Appl Res Technol 11(5):714–726
Patel R, Levin MW, Boyles S (2016) Effects of autonomous vehicle behavior on arterial and freeway networks. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2561
Provan JS (2003) A polynomial-time algorithm to find shortest paths with recourse. Networks 41(2):115–125
Qian Z, Rajagopal R (2013) Data-driven active parking management. In: Computing in civil engineering (2013), 395–402
Qian ZS, Rajagopal R (2014) Optimal dynamic parking pricing for morning commute considering expected cruising time. Transp Res Part C: Emerg Technol 48:468–490
Qing-Feng W, Qing-Gang W (2011) Research on public parking reservation system based on sms. In: ICTIS 2011: Multimodal approach to sustained transportation system development: information, technology, implementation, pp 636–643
Shoup DC (1997) The high cost of free parking. J Plan Educ Res 17(1):3–20
Sun W, Mouskos KC, Bernstein D (2003) A web-based parking reservation system. In: 82nd annual meeting of the transportation research board, Washington, DC
Tang S, Rambha T, Hatridge R, Boyles S, Unnikrishnan A (2014) Modeling parking search on a network by using stochastic shortest paths with history dependence. Transp Res Record: J Transp Res Board 2467:73–79
Tsai M-T, Chu C-P (2012) Evaluating parking reservation policy in urban areas: an environmental perspective. Transp Res Part D: Transp Environ 17(2):145–148
Wang H, He W (2011) A reservation-based smart parking system. In: 2011 IEEE conference on computer communications workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS). IEEE, pp 690–695
Yan G, Yang W, Rawat DB, Olariu S (2011a) Smartparking: a secure and intelligent parking system. Intell Transp Syst Mag IEEE 3(1):18–30
Yan T, Hoh B, Ganesan D, Tracton K, Iwuchukwu T, Lee J-S (2011b) Crowdpark: a crowdsourcing-based parking reservation system for mobile phones. University of Massachusetts at Amherst Tech Report
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge Dr. Tarun Rambha’s comments and suggestions. The authors also appreciate the support of the Data-Supported Transportation Operations & Planning Center and the National Science Foundation, Grant No. 1254921.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Levin, M.W., Boyles, S.D. Optimal Guidance Algorithms for Parking Search with Reservations. Netw Spat Econ 20, 19–45 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-019-09464-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-019-09464-7