International Journal of Engineering and Technology

Due to a rapid increase in the number of vehicles, the need for parking spaces is on rise. It is important to park the cars in close proximity to avoid traffic congestion and use a parking area efficiently. Current car parking management systems utilize human personnel to find available parking areas or use a video based system that collects the information in the form of images and tracks available parking slots. This paper describes an alternative energy efficient system which allots a unique parking ‘slot’ for every incoming car. The parking area has a number of ‘slots’ to park which are prioritized in such a way that the available slot nearest to the entry is allotted to every incoming car. The driver has to park in that particular slot allotted without searching for a vacant space thus reducing the time for parking and making an efficient use of available space. The System additionally makes efficient use of energy by switching the lights in the parking area ON only when a car is in motion. The application is developed on LPC1343 ARM processor and tested on a miniature prototype. The results suggest that it is a robust system and can be implemented in real time with an option to increase the number of parking slots as required.