The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : Book a parking slot online or through mobile

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Saturday, May 08, 2010
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Book a parking slot online or through mobile

Yogendra Kalavalapalli

C-DAC installs parking management system at Abids on a test basis

Whenever a vehicle is parked/moved out of the bay, information will reach management station
One can anaylse the data like number of vehicles parked on a day, its duration, etc.

Photo: G. Krishnaswamy

Going hi-tech: The electronic board, which is part of a traffic management system, shows parking slots available on different floors at a GHMC parking lot in Abids. —

HYDERABAD: If one has been to the multi-level GHMC parking facility in Abids recently, parking should have been a breezy affair.

Bright red digits denoting the vacant parking bays available in a direction, parking your four-wheeler would have been as easy fuelling up your tank.

Thanks to a solution, ubiquitous end-to-end parking management system deployed on a test basis by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) at the facility, it has been no hassles for motorists over the last 45 days.

Sensors

Ultrasonic sensors installed at every parking bay on levels one and two of the facility transmit continuous signals downwards from the roof where they are placed. “As soon as a vehicle moves into a parking bay, the signal is reflected in a shorter period of time. This indicates to the sensor that a vehicle has been parked in that particular bay,” explains S.V. Srikanth, the project's team lead.

Database

The sensor then alerts a zigbee transmitter that conveys the data to a gateway, which in turn sends it to the management station. “The management station contains complete database of the parking lot,” Dileep KP, a team member explains.

The data is then processed and the parking bay concerned updated in the database and the display boards. “The solution deducts one digit in the direction where a vehicle has been parked.” It is the reverse when a vehicle moves out of a parking bay.

The database is updated real-time in C-DAC's servers using an internet data card. Thus any registered user can monitor a parking lot from a remote location through the parking monitoring graphical user interface, which had been designed by the C-DAC team.

ne can also book a parking slot online or through a mobile application.

The solution also facilitates a parking administrator to analyse different data like the number of vehicles parked on a particular day or between specific time periods at different levels, parking duration, etc. This helps the managements plan their strategies better, says Tapas S, another team member.

Solution

With free spaces shrinking and the more vehicles hitting the roads with every passing day, are wireless technologies the way out for a parking-famished city? Plausible, if a solution like C-DAC's gets off the ground anytime soon.

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