Negotiating Parking Spaces in Smart Cities

Parking in urban areas is becoming a big concern for its environmental and economic implications. Smart parking systems are considered essential to improve both city life in terms of gas emission and air pollution, and motorists life by making it easier to park. Supporting technologies are emerging at the industrial level to easily locate available parking spaces, to automate parking payments, and to collect useful data on consumer demand. Nevertheless, the full potentiality of smart parking systems is still far to come, and it represents a big challenge for the future of Smart Cities. In this paper we propose to address the parking space allocation as the result of an agreement between parking providers and parking requestors that accommodates their respective requirements on some parking attributes. A software agent negotiation mechanism is adopted to establish such an agreement by taking into account user requirements on a parking space in terms of its location and cost, and the vendor requirements in terms of income and city regulations to obtain an ecient parking allocation and traffic redirection. It is shown that agent negotiation allows to allocate parking spaces to users in an automatic and intelligent manner by taking into account that a compromise among different preferences of users and vendors have to be met.