A City-aware Car Parks Marketplace for Smart Parking

Searching for a parking space in high populated urban areas is one of the major sources of traffic congestion, increased carbon emission, and wasted time for drivers. In this work, a multi-agent smart parking system is proposed to reserve parking spaces in response to parking requests. It is based on a distributed negotiation mechanism simulating a car park marketplace composed of parking space buyers and sellers. Negotiation is used to obtain parking allocations by taking into account different needs regarding parking location and price, an efficient distribution of parking spaces, and car circulation restrictions. In order to simulate a realistic marketplace, the distributed negotiation mechanism occurs among a set of drivers requesting parking spaces, and a set of parking vendors. The aim of the experimental evaluation is to determine the scalability of a distributed marketplace with respect to parking space re-sellers that share common city policy regulations, to allow for a smart distribution of allocations. The negotiation outcome is experimentally evaluated by considering the resulting social welfare of all the involved negotiators.