Car park reservation system

Abstract

Transportation is one of the well-known problems in metropolitan areas around the world. As revealed by the Transport Department, the total number of vehicle's registration keep raising year on year since 2006, with a latest number of 682,777 total registrations which includes 465,453 registrations for private cars were recorded on September 2011. On average, it is a very high people per vehicle ratio considering we have approximately seven million people living in Hong Kong. With such a high ratio, it puts a high pressures and requirements on facilities supporting driver's daily needs, it brings in a challenging situation for company to provides a good quality of service to their customers. Although there are many different kinds of offer provided by car park company to smoothen and relieve this situation, for instance, different kinds of payment method, park and ride scheme, various award and reward schemes as well as free parking scheme, it is still not a very satisfactory experience and hard to fulfill drivers' immediate parking need Our prototype introducing membership system, overbooking strategy and instance booking for car park reservation, car park operators can adjust the parameters such as available slot, overbook setting and reservation setting, which is in another words, transforming the physical parking spaces into logical spaces, and transform physical time into logical time. By overlapping virtual spaces and virtual travel time, it has potiential to maximize the parking space utilization and generate more revenue. From the user's point of view, they can reserve a guaranteed car park space in advance with minimal cost of instance reservation, and receive membership discount and benefit along with a convience system for searching and making reservation which reduce their unnecessary queueing and cycling time looking for an available car park space everywhere. Ultimately, saving in time, fuel and a better parking experience as well as enhancing the quality of service could be achieved by using this system and lead to a win-win situation for both parties.