A Reservation Based Parking Lot System To Maximize Occupancy And Revenue

Download or read book A Reservation Based Parking Lot System to Maximize Occupancy and Revenue written by Sonia Preeti Pinto and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Numerous parking issues are faced by people on a day to day basis. Congestion is caused by customers circling the lot in search of vacant parking spots while the lot may be full. At peak periods the parking lot may not be filled to maximum capacity because there are only primitive ways to indicate to customers the availability of spots in the lot. Thus parking garages tend to lose profit as usage of parking lots is not maximized. The Parking Lot System proposed aims to reduce these parking hassles faced by people and the occupancy issues faced by parking lot owners by providing customers with a facility of reserving parking spots before arrival at the lot. This reduces the parking search traffic as well as the parking search time. Additionally, this system proposes to automate occupancy tracking in the lot which ensures that customers are aware of the availability of parking spaces from remote locations. In case of unavailability of parking spaces, customers are notified at the entrance thereby reducing congestion levels in the lot. The designed system is simulated in real world scenarios to test the occupancy levels achieved by the lot. The practices and strategies used in well developed reservation systems (hotels and aviation industries) like overbooking are modified and applied in this domain to improve occupancy levels. An increase of about 5.19% in the occupancy level is observed. A comparative study of the effect of various business strategies is carried out to determine the best mix of user controllable parameters. The parameters controllable by the parking lot owners are the length of the grace period provided to customers to arrive and claim their reservation, the number of overbooked reservations made by the system and the proportion of spots in the lot available for reservation. A further increase of up to 5.97% in the occupancy level is observed by using different combinations and values of these parameters. For the purpose of simulation, the parking garage is assumed to be located in a city downtown area having customers using it for both corporate as well as leisure purpose.