A blockchain-enabled private parking space allocation with improved parking space utilization

Abstract

With the rapid development of the world’s infrastructure, we are moving towards making cities smart, known as smart cities. To make smart cities sustainable, designing efficient solutions is needed to reduce traffic congestion due to the lack of parking spaces within the constrained land areas of many metropolitan city centres. Parking problems in urban areas can be reduced by sharing vacant private parking spaces with others. In this work, we propose a decentralized and shared private parking management system using blockchain, which helps private parking owners and users fulfil their demands without the involvement of central authority. The proposed parking allocation method assigns parking to a single user from multiple parking providers, but the requester does not need to relocate between different parking spaces. The proposed method significantly improves private parking space utilization compared to a state-of-the-art parking allocation system. Hence, the system satisfies more user requests and generates more profit for parking owners than the state-of-the-art parking allocation system. The proposed system is a winning strategy because it maximizes the utilization of private parking spaces for the entire community’s benefit and helps to reduce traffic congestion. Experiments conducted in the simulated environment validate the benefits of the proposed model and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art parking allocation system. A prototype of the proposed system is also developed in the Ethereum blockchain to validate the work, and the gas cost used to deploy the proposed model is analyzed.