In this project an automated real-time parking information system was developed to improve truck-parking safety through the efficient gathering and disseminating of information regarding the use of existing parking capacity. The system consists of four main components: sensing, data collection, data processing and user interface (UI). A pilot deployment was conducted on a Maryland State Highway Administration truck parking facility located on Interstate-95 northbound prior to Maryland Route 32.
"TRB's National Cooperative Freight Research Program (NCFRP) Report 23: Synthesis of Freight Research in Urban Transportation Planning explores policies and practices for managing freight activity in metropolitan areas. The primary focus of the report is on "last-mile/first-mile" strategies, but it also addresses strategies affecting environmental issues and trading hubs or nodes. The research used to develop the report looked beyond the United States--mostly, but not exclusively' in Europe and the European BESTUFS (Best Urban Freight Solutions) program--for potentially relevant policies and practices that could be used in the United States"--Publication info.
"This report documents a study of truck parking issues along the major freight corridors in the 10-state MVFC region. An online GIS instrument was developed to administer surveys and allow for continuous public participation. The study surveyed highway patrol officers, public freight planners and truckers to identify parking facilities incommensurate with truck parking needs. It proposes a method to cluster marked spots for identifying areas with the most need for additional truck parking capacity. In-person carrier interviews were also conducted to further clarify truck parking problem causes and solutions. A set of low cost strategies are finally proposed to policy makers. This study also inventories both public and private parking facilities along the region's freight corridors and provides a review of previous studies"--Technical report documentation page.
An intelligent transportation system (ITS) offers considerable opportunities for increasing the safety, efficiency, and predictability of traffic flow and reducing vehicle emissions. Sensors (or detectors) enable the effective gathering of arterial and controlled-access highway information in support of automatic incident detection, active transportation and demand management, traffic-adaptive signal control, and ramp and freeway metering and dispatching of emergency response providers. As traffic flow sensors are integrated with big data sources such as connected and cooperative vehicles, and cell phones and other Bluetooth-enabled devices, more accurate and timely traffic flow information can be obtained. The book examines the roles of traffic management centers that serve cities, counties, and other regions, and the collocation issues that ensue when multiple agencies share the same space. It describes sensor applications and data requirements for several ITS strategies; sensor technologies; sensor installation, initialization, and field-testing procedures; and alternate sources of traffic flow data. The book addresses concerns related to the introduction of automated and connected vehicles, and the benefits that systems engineering and national ITS architectures in the US, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere bring to ITS. Sensor and data fusion benefits to traffic management are described, while the Bayesian and Dempster–Shafer approaches to data fusion are discussed in more detail. ITS Sensors and Architectures for Traffic Management and Connected Vehicles suits the needs of personnel in transportation institutes and highway agencies, and students in undergraduate or graduate transportation engineering courses.
Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Engineering - Computer Engineering, grade: A, , language: English, abstract: This project, introduces an automated and efficient solution for car parking management. Utilizing LabVIEW's front panel and block diagram functionalities, the system is specifically designed to automate the entry and exit processes in a car parking facility. The incorporation of an LCD provides real-time information on the total number of parked cars and available parking spaces. The project employs a slide switch to detect vehicle entry and exit, preventing further entries when the parking area reaches full capacity. In such cases, a "NO SPACE FOR PARKING" message is displayed on the LCD in red, signaling that the parking facility is at maximum capacity. The system ensures that the entrance gate remains closed if there is no available parking space. Upon a vehicle leaving the park, the controller updates the count and allows other vehicles to enter. To address limitations of existing systems, the proposed solution integrates IR sensors. These sensors not only determine the availability of parking slots but also allocate and de-allocate them based on the presence of vehicles at entry and exit points. This innovation eliminates the time-consuming process of searching for an empty parking slot in a large area, providing a more user-friendly and efficient car parking management system. The inclusion of LED indicators further enhances user experience by signaling the availability of parking spaces in real-time, with green indicating availability and red indicating occupancy.
Unhyped and therefore unnoticed, technology is altering the behavior and mission of city halls, statehouses, schools, and federal agencies across America. From transportation to education to elections to law enforcement (or, as we're now referring to it, 'homeland security'), the digital revolution is transforming government and politics, slashing bureaucracies; improving services; producing innovative solutions to some of our nation's thorniest problems; changing the terms of the Left/Right political debate; and offering ordinary people access to a degree of information and individual influence until recently accessible only to the most powerful citizens, finally redeeming the Founding Fathers' original vision for our democracy, and enriching American life and society in the process. Based on interviews with over 500 leading politicians, researchers, technology industry CEOs and leaders, futurists and front-line public employees, Government 2.0 journeys across America and overseas to demonstrate the promise and perils of this emerging world and offer a likely road map to its implementation. You'll hear from technology executives preparing for an onrushing future when, for many citizens, most government interactions could take place on private-sector websites; from bureaucrats like OSHA's Ed Stern fighting to get their agencies to adopt expert systems technology; from William Bennett, whose virtual education company offers a glimpse into one possible future of American education; and from Governor Jeb Bush and former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as they endeavor to overcome bureaucratic inertia to provide more open, efficient, and effective governments. Rich with anecdotes and case studies, Government 2.0 is a must read for every entrepreneur frustrated by paperwork, every parent who's sick of being surprised by bad report cards, every commuter stuck in traffic, every activist trying to fight City Hall, and every taxpayer who cares about the future of government.
In an increasingly globalised world, despite reductions in costs and time, transportation has become even more important as a facilitator of economic and human interaction; this is reflected in technical advances in transportation systems, increasing interest in how transportation interacts with society and the need to provide novel approaches to understanding its impacts. This has become particularly acute with the impact that Covid-19 has had on transportation across the world, at local, national and international levels. Encyclopedia of Transportation, Seven Volume Set - containing almost 600 articles - brings a cross-cutting and integrated approach to all aspects of transportation from a variety of interdisciplinary fields including engineering, operations research, economics, geography and sociology in order to understand the changes taking place. Emphasising the interaction between these different aspects of research, it offers new solutions to modern-day problems related to transportation. Each of its nine sections is based around familiar themes, but brings together the views of experts from different disciplinary perspectives. Each section is edited by a subject expert who has commissioned articles from a range of authors representing different disciplines, different parts of the world and different social perspectives. The nine sections are structured around the following themes: Transport Modes; Freight Transport and Logistics; Transport Safety and Security; Transport Economics; Traffic Management; Transport Modelling and Data Management; Transport Policy and Planning; Transport Psychology; Sustainability and Health Issues in Transportation. Some articles provide a technical introduction to a topic whilst others provide a bridge between topics or a more future-oriented view of new research areas or challenges. The end result is a reference work that offers researchers and practitioners new approaches, new ways of thinking and novel solutions to problems. All-encompassing and expertly authored, this outstanding reference work will be essential reading for all students and researchers interested in transportation and its global impact in what is a very uncertain world. Provides a forward looking and integrated approach to transportation Updated with future technological impacts, such as self-driving vehicles, cyber-physical systems and big data analytics Includes comprehensive coverage Presents a worldwide approach, including sets of comparative studies and applications
Real-time parking occupancy information is critical for a parking management system to facilitate drivers to park more efficiently. Recent advances in connected and automated vehicle technologies enable sensor-equipped cars (probe cars) to detect and broadcast available parking spaces when driving through parking lots. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of market penetration of probe cars on the system performance, and investigate different parking guidance policies to improve the data acquisition process. We adopt a simulation-based approach to impose four policies on an offstreet parking lot influencing the behavior of probe cars to park in assigned parking spaces. This in turn effects the scanning route and the parking space occupancy estimations. The last policy we propose is a near-optimal guidance strategy that maximizes the information gain of posteriors. The results suggest that an efficient information gathering policy can compensate for low penetration of connected and automated vehicles. We also highlight the policy trade-off that occur while attempting to maximize information gain through explorations and improve assignment accuracy through exploitations. Our results can assist urban policy makers in designing and managing smart parking systems.
This thesis demonstrates development of a complete suite of path planning, elevator scheduling and resource allocation algorithms to manage multiple concurrent requests, in real time and in a dynamic context, for storage and retrieval of vehicles loaded onto robotic carts for a robotic, fully-automated, multi-story and driving-free parking structure. The objective is to utilize, for parking, the available spaces across the floors of a parking structure that does not have any driving lanes at a much higher percentage rate which is greater than or equal to 80% in all cases while keeping the customer waiting times at minimum. Path search and planning employs the incremental informed search algorithm D* Lite with domain-specific heuristics, and the uninformed search algorithm Uniform Cost Search in a completely-automated framework. An optimization algorithm based on nested partitions and genetic algorithm is adapted for scheduling of a group of elevators in the multi-story parking structure environment. A small percentage of parking spots are reserved as "blank cells" to facilitate movement of roller beds carrying a vehicle to its storage or retrieval destination. Resource allocation and management is accomplished using statistical models employing queueing theory for structural resources such as blank cells and elevators while minimizing customer waiting time. Lower bounds on the number of elevators needed for a specific floor count and number of parking spaces per floor are derived using statistical modeling. Multiple vehicles are considered to be potentially moving from one parking space to another by roller bed pallets moving along tracks mounted on the surface of each storage cell. A software simulator based on multi-threaded Java code and unified modeling language was developed to perform empirical testing and validation of the performance of the proposed integration framework for the set of path search, elevator scheduling and resource management algorithms. A comprehensive set of test cases where the number of floors in the parking structure, the number of cells on each floor, the number of elevators and the percentage of blank cells are parameters for exploration, are generated applying the constraints that the utilization of the parking structure has to be equal or greater than 80%, and during the "morning/evening rush hours" the capacity of parking lot needs to be fully utilized within a two clock-hour period. A typical business day scenario where morning rush hour that fills the parking lot to its maximum capacity at its conclusion and the evening rush hour that nearly empties the entire parking lot from a fully-occupied state was considered. Multiple concurrent and combination of storage and retrieval requests were generated assuming Poisson distributed customer arrivals. The performance effect of immobilized carts that form fixed obstacles on the parking floor was considered. Performance of the proposed system was assessed and evaluated using a number of performance metrics that included customer waiting time for storage request, customer waiting time for retrieval request, utilization rate for each elevator, average travel distance for storage process, average travel distance for retrieval process and maximum utilization rate for each floor. Simulation results indicate that the robotic, fully-automated and multi-story parking structure system presented in this thesis is feasible and practical for a real time context. The customer waiting time for both storage and retrieval requests is primarily distributed within reasonably acceptable ranges even in the presence of many concurrent storage and retrieval requests and accommodating a variety of customer arrival rates and numerous immobilized vehicles to make it possible for deployment in real-time environments. The simulation study results further indicated that system could handle over 100 concurrent requests in real time. The simulation study indicates that the set of algorithms developed are suitable for robotic, fully-automated and multi-story robotic parking structure to serve concurrent storage-retrieval requests representing a wide range of Poisson distributed customer arrival rates in real time with manageable computing resources under real-life scenarios.
