Urban Parking Availability (UPA)

Urban Parking Availability (UPA)

Urban Parking Availability (UPA)

Urban Parking Availability provides parking availability information and guidance for drivers to make informed choices about available parking places. This service aims to reduce congestion, time loss, pollution, and stress caused by cruising for parking.

Participating actors in Urban Parking Availability are vehicle drivers who send messages through when leaving their parking spaces, or receive messages containing information on the location of the vehicle parking space, municipalities which wishes the reduction of congestion and pollution, and parking operators (for private parking) who wish higher occupancy of parking slots.

The objective of Urban Parking Availability is to provide information on the location of a vehicle parking space being released to vehicle drivers looking for a parking space in a given urban area.

Business Models

Taking into account various stakeholders’ views, a list of business model blueprints that address current or future challenges of urban areas, together with their operating and value-capture scenarios depicting the inner-workings of the business models, and the exchange of costs-benefits among stakeholders, have been created for the Urban Parking Availability service.

Architecture

ITS-G5

In case of ITS-G5 communications, a loop flow IN and OUT of the On-Board Unit (OBU) indicates that broadcast and/or unicast information is disseminated using the IEEE 802.11p protocol so other OBU can receive it. The OBU broadcasts parking spot lookup information, to indicate that a vehicle is looking for a parking possibility. The receiving OBUs can use the same interface to inform the searching vehicle about the releasing of a parking spot via unicast, as an answer to the lookup, if a vehicle is about to leave a parking spot. Optionally, a reservation message is also sent using the same connection, to inform the leaving OBU that another vehicle will take over the parking spot.

Cellular

In case of cellular communications, the Personal Information Device (PID) requests information about loading zones from the service providers, who forward the request to data providers and receive that information. Then, service providers can provide the parking information to the PID.

Architecture schema

Detailed information about Urban Parking Availability architecture can be found here.

upa

Suppliers

Suppliers of components and solutions for the Urban Parking Availability service include research institutes, such as CEIT, CTAG, as well as private companies, such as Gertek SA, Infinity Neural, NeoGLS, Kapsch, Dynniq, Traffic Technique,and Swarco.

Within the C-MobILE project the Urban Parking Availability service is implemented in two Deployment Sites: Bilbao and Bordeaux.

Bilbao

In Bilbao the UPA service is based on cellular communication technology. This service provides information about availability of on-street parking in the urban road network. CEIT is the service provider cooperating with Bilbao OpenData Platform for the data provisioning. GERTEK S.A. is the App provider for this service thanks to which the road users can receive real time information about parking availability on public streets in the city.

Note: This service is currently implemented as a proof of concept (App not available), and it will be integrated in the city’s official App soon.

Bordeaux

In Bordeaux the UPA service is implemented using both cellular and ITS-G5 communication technologies. Information on real-time parking occupancy is provided by Bordeaux Métropole through OpenData. Information on available parking spaces in every parking lot in the city centre is broadcasted to drivers together with park & ride advices. The service provider for UPA is NeoGLS and the service is available through the App “CTD – Connected Mobility”.

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