Context-Aware Parking Systems in Urban Areas: A Survey and Early Experiments

Parking spaces have been considered as vital resources in urban areas. Finding parking spaces in jam-packed areas are often challenging, stressful and uncertain for the drivers that cause traffic congestion with a consequent of wastage of time, fuel and increase of pollution. These problems can be addressed using smart parking systems if drivers reserve parking slots in advance. With the proliferation of smart devices in a pervasive computing environment, real-time monitoring of the traffic situation and parking areas is often trivial using context-awareness. Context-awareness has the capability to occupy parking slots dynamically at any time and in any place. However, it is often challenging in busy parking areas because vehicles occupy and leave parking slots very frequently. This paper presents a brief survey on context-aware smart parking systems theoretically as well as practically. We propose a context-aware parking application to assist drivers in finding parking slots dynamically while moving and/or arriving at the destination.