electronics

Article
Design and Development of Smart Parking System Based on
Fog Computing and Internet of Things
Mohammed Balfaqih 1, * , Waheb Jabbar 2,3 , Mashael Khayyat 4, * and Rosilah Hassan 5

1 Department of Computer and Network Engineering, College of Computer Science and Engineering,
University of Jeddah, Jeddah 23890, Saudi Arabia
2 Faculty of Electrical & Electronic Engineering Technology, Universiti Malaysia Pahang,
Pekan 26600, Malaysia; [email protected]
3 Centre for Software Development & Integrated Computing, Universiti Malaysia Pahang,
Gambang 26300, Malaysia
4 Department of Information Systems and Technology, College of Computer Science and Engineering,
University of Jeddah, Jeddah 23890, Saudi Arabia
5 Center for Cyber Security, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan
Malaysia (UKM), Bangi 43600, Malaysia; [email protected]
* Correspondence: [email protected] (M.B.); [email protected] (M.K.)

Abstract: Current parking systems employ a single gateway-centered solution (i.e., cloud) for data
processing which leads to the possibility of a single point of failure, data loss, and high delays.
Moreover, the parking-spot selection process considers criteria that do not maximize parking uti-
lization and revenue. The pricing strategy does not achieve high revenue because a fixed pricing



rate is utilized. To address these issues, this paper proposes a smart parking system based on the

 Internet of Things (IoT) that provides useful information to drivers and parking administrators about
Citation: Balfaqih, M.; Jabbar, W.; available parking spots and related services such as parking navigation, reservation, and availability
Khayyat, M.; Hassan, R. Design and estimation. A multi-layer architecture is developed that consists of multiple sensor nodes, and fog
Development of Smart Parking and cloud computing layers. The acquired parking data are processed through fog computing nodes
System Based on Fog Computing and to facilitate obtaining the required real-time parking data. A novel algorithm to obtain the optimal
Internet of Things. Electronics 2021, 10, parking spot with the minimum arrival time is also presented. Proof-of-concept implementation and
3184. https://doi.org/10.3390/
simulation evaluations are conducted to validate the system performance. The findings show that
electronics10243184
the system reduces the parking arrival time by 16–46% compared to current parking systems. In
addition, the revenue is increased for the parking authority by 10–15%.
Academic Editors: Andrei Vladyko
and Ammar Muthanna
Keywords: smart parking; pricing strategy; parking-spot selection; availability estimation; fog computing
Received: 1 December 2021
Accepted: 17 December 2021
Published: 20 December 2021
1. Introduction
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral The smart city concept integrates information and communication technologies (ICT)
with regard to jurisdictional claims in to facilitate sustainable development, economic growth, and quality-of-life improve-
published maps and institutional affil- ment [1–3]. One of the directions leading towards smart cities is the development of
iations. intelligent transportation and efficient traffic management systems to optimize drivers’
travel planning and alleviate traffic congestion [4–7]. Currently, drivers obtain a parking
spot themselves by searching all spots until an available spot is found. This leads to a waste
of valuable time that may hinder economic growth [3]. In addition, during the waiting time
Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. due to congestion, the vehicles are burning fuel unnecessarily, causing high greenhouse
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. gas emissions [8]. These issues can be addressed using a smart parking system that helps
This article is an open access article drivers to determine and reserve parking spots in advance before reaching their destination.
distributed under the terms and Such systems would become highly significant in almost every major city in the world,
conditions of the Creative Commons especially during large events (e.g., conferences, religious events, sporting events, festivals,
Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// and concerts). They would help in tackling traffic congestion, reducing pollution, and
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ minimizing the negative impact on the city landscape and environment [9].
4.0/).

Electronics 2021, 10, 3184. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10243184 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics

Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 2 of 18

Smart parking systems form part of traffic management strategies and manage parking
processes by helping vehicles to park efficiently in a way that reduces parking arrival time
and traffic congestion. The development of smart parking systems has attracted the
attention of researchers in academia and industry, due to their economic, environmental,
and aesthetic impacts. The Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as a leading technology
for smart object communication [10]. IoT is the key enabler technology for smart parking
systems, which employ different sensing technologies (e.g., ultrasonic, magnetometers, and
visual sensors) and networking technologies (e.g., ZigBee, Wi-Fi, and cellular). It facilitates
real-time monitoring and control by collecting real-time sensor data and integrating with
other technologies such as machine learning, sensor fusion, and computing [11]. Several
commercial parking systems have been developed such as SmartParking [12], PlacePod [13],
and Sitraffic Scala [14]. These systems offer several features such as remote parking-spot
booking, fee payment, interactive parking maps, and others. However, their main drawback
is the high cost and the limited development capability for public developers since they
are not open source. In addition, the current systems do not meet today’s parking needs
and the expectations of smart city evolution.
The current systems employ a single gateway-centered solution using cloud com-
puting. IoT data are collected and sent to the Internet for processing, which leads to the
possibility of a single point of failure, data loss during network interruption, and high
delays due to data flow across the network to the cloud. In addition, most of the imple-
mented parking monitoring systems are locally operated and do not provide real-time
information to the driver about where to find a parking space [15]. The utilized communi-
cation technologies are based on wired systems or short-range communication methods
such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or ZigBee, which are not reliable in most scenarios of indoor and
outdoor parking. They also face many issues related to interference, energy consumption,
and limited resources.
Moreover, different criteria have been considered for parking-spot selection, such
as the preferences of users and operators. The existing systems consider the demand
and driver preferences only. The selection decision must be based on a criterion that
reduces congestion and maximizes parking utilization and, consequently, revenue. The
pricing strategy, on the other hand, in parking lots, is usually based on a fixed rate per
hour for short-term parking and a fixed subscription rate for long-term parking, which
does not achieve a high revenue. The fixed rate is obtained periodically according to
the previous occupancy rate. Such a strategy does not take advantage of the parking
availability and demand, and hence it leads to sub-optimal pricing. Therefore, this paper
reports on the design and development of a smart parking system based on a multi-layer
IoT architecture to resolve the aforementioned issues. The system considers different
parking plans, including a short-term parking plan with and without advance reservation
and a long-term parking plan. The proposed system is evaluated through implementation
and simulation of a selected area representing our case study (i.e., Kudai parking lot). The
system has the following features:
• A multi-layer IoT architecture consisting of IoT, fog and cloud layers to overcome
the limitations of single gateway-centered solutions. Distributed fog computing
nodes are employed to process data locally and forward essential data only to cloud
servers. Sensor nodes connect to fog nodes through energy-efficient LoRaWAN
communication technology, except for the vision sensors which are connected through
Wi-Fi technology. This is because LoRa communication offers a low data rate that is
suitable for sensor nodes that do not continuously send large amounts of data.
• A parking-spot selection algorithm that considers arrival time to a parking spot as a
parking selection criterion, to reduce waiting time and congestion and, consequently,
air pollution. The arrival information for the parking lot, including the rate of entering
and departing the parking lot, the parking availability rate, and vehicles’ GPS locations
are considered. The visual sensor information at junctions is also used to obtain the
congestion rate.
Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 3 of 18

• Parking availability estimation that facilitates the parking reservation process with
the aim of maximizing parking-lot utilization. Reservation is allowed a minimum of
three hours in advance to give walk-in clients the chance of finding a parking spot
and, consequently, to reduce traffic congestion at the parking-lot entrance.
• A hybrid pricing algorithm to maximize the parking revenue. The algorithm utilizes
an hourly-rate pricing strategy for short-term planning and a dynamic pricing strategy
for long-term planning. The dynamic pricing represents a dynamic subscription rate
that is set to correspond with demand and revenue.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses related studies
on smart parking systems and highlights their limitations and the contributions of our
proposed system. In Section 3, the proposed parking system is described, including the
proposed multi-layer IoT architecture and the operation workflow, parking-spot selection,
parking availability estimation, and hybrid pricing algorithms. Section 4 describes the
details of the implementation and simulation evaluation for the case study considered,
and the utilized hardware and software tools. The obtained results are also discussed
and analyzed. Finally, the conclusions and suggestions for future work are presented
in Section 5.

2. Related Work
Several review articles have been presented in the literature that explore, classify, and
discuss the technical aspects of smart parking solutions [16–19]. This section discusses
related smart parking systems from existing studies, obtained by searching using the
keywords ‘smart parking’ and ‘IoT parking’ in several databases such as ISI Web of Science
and Scopus. Searching using these keywords resulted in 316 articles, with 127 articles from
the ISI Web of Science and 189 articles from Scopus. The duplicated articles from these
two databases were removed, resulting in 275 final articles. Figure 1 shows the review
methodology used to obtain the related articles considered.

Figure 1. Related articles selection methodology.

The scopes of these articles address different issues, including application and usabil-
ity [20–22], pricing and contracts [23–25], availability prediction and allocation [26–28],
and others. The 275 articles were further scrutinized based on the problem scope, solution
approach, and evaluation method. Applying the review methodology helped in extracting
the 14 articles most relevant to the scope and objectives of this paper. Different criteria
could be considered to classify the systems, including parking environment, provided
services, or core sensing technique. Parking systems can be classified based on the core
Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 4 of 18

sensing technique into wireless-sensor-based systems, motion-sensor-based systems, and

camera-sensor-based systems. This section will discuss only the smart parking solutions
most related to the proposed solution in this article, i.e., wireless-sensor-based systems that
utilize LoRa as the network infrastructure of the system.
A proof-of-concept implementation of a smart parking system with LoRa infrastruc-
ture has been presented in several papers [29–31]. The developed implementations showed
that such a system is efficient in terms of energy, integrity, and scalability for parking
monitoring and management in large cities. In [32], the system was implemented with
an online reservation system for car parking lots at Universitas Hasanuddin. Similarly,
the authors in [33] developed a smart parking system based on LoRa that contains a sen-
sor module, a cloud server module, reservation application, and a third-party payment
platform. The system was tested in two cities in Zhejiang province, China: Ningbo and
Zhoushan. The experimental results showed an enhancement in monitoring and booking
capabilities. However, the quality, security, and reliability of the LoRa communication were
not tested in real parking lots in a complex urban environment.
A smart parking solution was proposed in [34] that combines Libelium smart parking
sensors, LoRaWAN, and a cluster of Kubernetes with MQTT and MongoDB. The combina-
tion enhanced the availability, scalability, and portability of the smart parking system by
overcoming the information-sharing bottleneck. The system accumulates all messages in
the messaging server for further processing if the main server for information collection
fails. Another smart parking solution with a pricing algorithm for revenue maximization
was proposed in [35]. The price is dynamically set to balance the available and requested
parking spots and ensure the minimum parking fee is charged. The solution comprises
multiple sensors that recognize vehicles and obtain contextual and environmental informa-
tion. Moreover, edge–cloud computing is utilized to minimize the network load and the
number of gateways.
Other studies have proposed methods to enhance the interoperability of parking
solutions. The system in [36] adopted an IoT gateway-centric architecture [37] that allows
real-time interaction between all supported sensor devices and/or actuators through a LoRa
gateway using the LoRa network. The gateway, in turn, transforms packets to the format
acceptable to the server. Hence, there is no need for a network server to route packets to
their destination. The received packets are then parsed by Spring functions and processed
with data from the database if required, to finalize the findings and pass them to users.
The payment functions for the parking system utilize the API payment highway. In [38], a
novel framework-based Wise-IoT system [8] was developed for global interoperability and
mobility of IoT applications and devices. The system was developed based on different IoT
infrastructures (one was LoRaWAN) and two different interoperability layers. The system
was implemented in two cities around the world: Busan and Santander. The generated
sensor observations in Santander were sent on different instances of oneM2M and FIWARE
IoT platforms, while in Busan, they were distributed using oneM2M as a back end. As a
result, the smart parking developed for Santander could be used in a different location in
Busan and vice versa.
For privacy preservation in parking systems, the authors in [39] proposed an enhanced
LoRaWAN security protocol that provides basic connectivity functions and averts security
issues. It prevents a malicious network server from breaking the end-to-end security
between a device and its application server. The protocol was examined using different
tools and the results showed that the proposed protocol overcomes two handshake options
in terms of network latency and signaling overheads. In [40], a new method using a
secure element was proposed to safely store keys and process the LoRaWAN protocol. The
secure element handles security functions such as data encryption and message signing.
In addition, an efficient integrity verification method was proposed for the executable in
the main microcontroller unit, based on a secure element. Table 1 summarizes the most
relevant related studies.
Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 5 of 18

Table 1. A summary of the most relevant parking systems.

Parking
Online Parking Reservation Payment Tested Parking
Research Study Availability
Platform Navigation Service Platform Area
Estimation
√ √
Angelov, K.K. 2020. √ √ x
√ x x None
Anshar, M., et al., 2020. √ √ √ x x
√ Campus parking
Shi, J., et al., 2017. √ √ √ x √ City parking
Barriga, J.J., et al., 2020. √ √ x City parking
Sotres, P., et al., 2018. √ √ x
√ x
√ x
√ City parking
Proposed System City parking

3. Proposed Smart Parking System

The proposed smart parking system monitors and manages parking lots to make
the vehicle parking process more convenient and comfortable by guiding drivers to their
parking spot with less congestion and a shorter traveling time. The system consists of
cloud computing, fog computing nodes, a group of sensors, and parking management
software to acquire and process the data related to parking booking, availability, and
pricing. The components have wireless connection capability to send the data to the fog
node, which processes the collected data. The system considers three parking classes
based on the parking plan: (i) vehicles with a parking subscription, (ii) vehicles with an
advance parking reservation, and (iii) vehicles without a parking reservation. The following
sub-sections detail the parking system architecture and operation, parking availability
estimation, parking-spot selection, and pricing algorithms. Table 2 gives the list of the
notations utilized throughout the paper.

Table 2. List of notations.

Symbol Definition Symbol Definition

i Edge lane λi Traffic density on that edge
V Vehicle number in an edge Mi Maximum capacity of vehicles on that edge
C The total congestion rate of all edge lanes on the route T The total number of all edge lanes on the route
Si A parking spot Sj The current state of parking spot Si
pi A parking lot Capi Capacity of a parking lot
d Discount percentage r Range of hours
PT The total parking price PF The first-hour price rate
Ps The price rate after the first hour h Total parking hours
N The maximum value of ranges R The parking revenue
k The number of available parking spots for subscriptions Pn The subscription price rate of nth parking lot.
Un The number of clients who afford a specific rate Ratem The maximum rate that mth driver affords

3.1. Parking System Architecture and Operation Workflow

A multi-layer IoT architecture for the parking system manages and monitors parking
lots efficiently and maintains a low congestion rate. The architecture overcomes the limita-
tions of the traditional sensor–cloud architecture by employing distributed fog computing
nodes to process data locally and forward essential data only to cloud servers, instead of
forwarding all the data. This maintains fast processing and transmission of the required
data only, to achieve a real-time application experience in which the data required for the
general view or for long-term services (e.g., parking lots in different locations across a
city or historical parking data) are transmitted to the cloud. The architecture consists of
three layers: (i) IoT parking layer, (ii) fog layer, and (iii) cloud layer, as shown in Figure 2.
Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 6 of 18

Figure 2. Multi-layer parking system architecture.

3.1.1. IoT Parking Layer

The lowest layer consists of a group of sensor nodes to monitor the parking lots by
detecting vehicles and gathering data about the parking area. Different types of sensors
could be utilized, placed either in the ground (e.g., electromagnetic sensors), in the ceiling,
or in street pillars (e.g., ultrasonic and visual sensors). The most suitable sensor to be
utilized is obtained based on the parking lot and its surrounding environment. Mag-
netometer sensors and thermal cameras are utilized in a parking lot that is exposed to
different weather conditions, to detect variations in the magnetic field and differences in
temperature. Visual sensors are preferred for more sophisticated parking areas or if they
are already installed [41].
In this layer, our system employs several sensors and data acquisition devices in-
cluding ultrasonic, magnetic, and visual sensors, radio-frequency identification (RFID),
Global Positioning System (GPS) equipment, QR code readers and a parking management
platform. For instance, visual sensors are placed at the entrance, exits, and junctions to pro-
vide useful information for parking-spot selection and to monitor parking rule violations.
Solar panels connected to a rechargeable battery are used to supply the power required by
the data acquisition devices. Sensor nodes communicate with fog nodes through energy-
efficient LoRaWAN communication technology, while vision sensors communicate through
Wi-Fi technology. This is because LoRa communication offers a low data rate (i.e., up to
37.5 kbps) which is suitable for sensor nodes that do not continuously send large amounts
of data. LoRa technology facilitates long-range communication up to 5 km with 25 mW
maximum transmission power [42]. The configuration parameters and frequency carriers
of LoRa are set according to the local regulations.

3.1.2. Fog Layer

As mentioned earlier, the purpose of this layer is to provide a robust solution that
achieves real-time control and analytics requirements by relocating some of the processing
and analysis (e.g., data pre-processing, filtering, and compression) close to the lowest
hierarchical layer. This includes the processes of parking-spot selection, parking availability
estimation, and pricing in our proposed parking system. The fog layer is usually composed
of several fog nodes where the process of a specific service relates to a specific node,
according to its requirements. Fog nodes are defined as distributed computing entities
that have processing capabilities where each node can be formed by one or more physical
Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 7 of 18

devices (e.g., network device, dedicated server, or computational server). Each node can
simultaneously process multiple sensor nodes with the possibility of sensor-node handover
if there is a high execution load or a connectivity problem. Moreover, a collaborative task
allocation can be performed to share the computational load among fog nodes to reduce
the overall operational latency.

3.1.3. Cloud Layer

The highest layer provides virtually unlimited storage and computational resources.
The cloud layer facilitates several services for the proposed parking system, such as
usage analytics, statistical and historical information, revenue monitoring, and automatic
payment and management. The cloud layer also enables secure, real-time online parking
reservation information and direction to the reserved parking through a parking platform
running on the web or installed in a mobile device. An encryption technique could be
employed in the cloud layer to hide the payment plan and driver information, to guarantee
security and privacy. Moreover, historical, and long-term information could be used for
big data analytics to enhance traffic management and smart city solutions, as well as to
enable real-time feedback notification and emergency alerts.
The workflow of the proposed parking system is shown in Figure 3. The process starts
by obtaining parking-lot data through sensor nodes and the parking management platform.
After data acquisition, the physical variables of the vehicle are sent to the fog nodes,
including parking reservation, arrival, and vehicle detection. The fog nodes process the
collected data every 10 ms to ensure accurate decisions and minimize the usage of resources
and processing capabilities. The acquired data are processed to determine the information
on arrival, parking availability, parking matching, and parking reservations. Based on
the data, four different algorithms are executed including parking availability estimation,
security alerts, dynamic pricing, and parking-spot selection. A detailed description of
theses algorithms is given in the following sub-sections. The outcome of the algorithms
is transmitted to the cloud computing layer through network devices and, consequently,
transmits the parking information to the parking management platform.

Figure 3. The operation of the smart parking system.

Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 8 of 18

3.2. Parking-Spot Selection Algorithm

The parking-spot selection is initiated upon vehicle entry into the parking lot. The
parking-spot selection process uses an optimization algorithm that selects the optimal
parking with the aim of minimizing the arrival time to a parking spot. The algorithm
is applied to vehicles with and without a parking reservation but not to vehicles with
a parking subscription. It utilizes the information on parking arrival and reservation,
including the rate of entry and exit, parking availability rate, and the vehicle’s GPS location.
In addition, the visual sensor information at junctions will be used to obtain the congestion
rate using the congestion model presented in [43]. The entrance point is used as a navigation
start-up to select the parking lot, which is determined during the vehicle arrival. The
algorithm performs a forward search process in which the entrance point is located and
then the expected arrival time to an available parking spot is calculated. Moreover, a
backtracking process is performed to compute the arrival time from the parking spot back
to the preceding entrance point.
An example of the parking-spot selection process is shown in Figure 4. Each road has
two edge lanes and a maximum capacity for vehicles. For an edge lane i, the density λi of
the traffic is calculated as
λi = V/Mi (1)
where V represents number of vehicles in the edge and Mi represents the maximum
capacity of vehicles in that edge. The density is shown as a percentage in Figure 4. The
total congestion rate of all edge lanes on the route is calculated as
j
C= ∑i=1 λ /Ti (2)

where T is the total number of all edge lanes on the route. The search for the optimal
parking spot starts from a given entrance node to an available parking spot that achieves
the minimum travelling time. Accordingly, the search graph consists of a root node which
is the entrance point, and the next-level nodes which are all the junctions that can directly
be accessed from the previous level (i.e., first root node) and so on, until candidate available
parking spots are identified. The graph constitutes a tree-like view in which the maximum
depth represents the number of junctions and the candidate parking junction within this
depth. The optimal path with minimum travelling time can be found using Dijkstra’s
algorithm [44].

Figure 4. Parking-spot selection and vehicle routing.

Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 9 of 18

3.3. Parking Availability Estimation

Parking availability estimation is proposed to facilitate the parking reservation process.
Reservation is allowed a minimum of three hours in advance if it is estimated that parking
spots will be available at the requested time. This maximizes parking-lot utilization and
gives vehicles without a prior parking reservation the chance to find a parking spot, conse-
quently reducing traffic congestion at the parking-lot entrance. The parking availability at
the current instant in time is known by the fog nodes in the system. However, this informa-
tion is not sufficient for estimating the parking availability in the near future because the
vehicle arrival rate fluctuates in different seasonal periods. The traffic fluctuation can be
predicted using predictive analytics from the historical seasonal data, which are collected
from sensors at parking entrances and junction poles. These historical data are stored in
the cloud and categorized according to seasonal periods into several instances. The periods
must be small enough (e.g., one minute) to minimize the variations in parking dynamics.
These data are used to develop a stochastic model based on a Markov process representing
the randomly changing available parking spots.
The Markov model infers the parking availability in a future period from the historical
parking availability information in similar periods. The model obtains several parameters
for each parking lot including the observation time window, arrival rate, departure rate
and state transition matrix. Table 3 shows an example of parking lot data, where multiple
historical one-minute-period observations in similar seasons are averaged. The period
is set to be short in order to obtain discrete state changes in a parking lot modelled over
a time window of five minutes with fixed arrival and departure rates. The reason for
choosing a short period is to justify the assumption that arrival and departure rates are
fixed within each observation window; however, variations in arrival and departure rates
are considered across observation windows. A single state transition matrix that represents
the parking dynamics information is obtained for each observation window size.

Table 3. Parking data sample.

Parking Lot pi
1 Season
Period (Time) Available Spots (Average)
Year Month Day
1439 Safar 5 9 h 56 m 987
1440 Safar 5 9 h 56 m 970
1441 Safar 5 9 h 56 m 950
1442 Safar 5 9 h 56 m 987
1443 Safar 5 9 h 56 m 960
1 Note: Makkah parking lots form the case study in our work, where the historical parking data fluctuate according to the Hijri calendar;
thus, this calendar is used in the system.

For each parking lot, parking states are determined in which
each state represents
the parking availability range. The future availability state P Si |S j of a parking spot Si
is obtained using the classic Markov chain model and Kendall’s notation, where S j is the
current state [45]. The Poisson distribution is utilized in the simulation to represent the
arrival process in periods with a fixed mean value for the number of entering and departing
vehicles to/from a parking lot over a single observation period. The proposed parking
availability estimation uses five state ranges for a parking lot, from the highly occupied
state S1 to the highly available state S5 . Figure 5 shows an example of a state transition
matrix for a parking lot with capacity Capi = 1000, which is derived from historical data
with a five-minute period of observation. A normalized transition matrix in terms of
probabilistic weights is also illustrated in Figure 5.
Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 10 of 18

Algorithm 1: Hybrid pricing algorithm.

BEGIN;
If short-term parking plan is selected then
Š Process pricing for short-term parking plan;
else if long-term parking plan is selected then
Š Process pricing for short-term parking plan;
end;

(1) process pricing for short-term parking plan;

Determine the price of the first hour;
Determine the parking hours range;
Calculate the price of the later hours according to the applied discount percentage based on the
determined parking hours range;
Calculate the total price of the short-term parking which is sum of the price of the first and later
hours;

(2) process pricing for long-term parking plan;

Clients bid once or more during selected seasonal periods;
Determine the optimal pricing rate that matches demand and revenue;
Prioritize the clients based on their bidding value and time stamp in a descending order;

Figure 5. Markov model: (a) availability states, (b) occurrence frequency, and (c) transition matrix.

3.4. Hybrid Pricing Algorithm

An algorithm was developed to facilitate the pricing strategy for two types of park-
ing plans: (i) a short-term parking plan (i.e., parking with and without a reservation)
and (ii) a long-term parking plan (i.e., monthly and annual parking subscriptions). The hy-
brid pricing includes an hourly-rate pricing strategy for the short-term plan and a dynamic
pricing strategy for the long-term plan. Algorithm 1 shows the pseudocode of the hybrid
pricing algorithm.
The hourly pricing rate considers the possibility of specifying certain discount rates.
It sets a fixed price rate for the first hour, then the price rate of the later hours is calculated
based on ranges in which a specified discount percentage (d) is applied upon exceeding a
specified range of hours (r). The total parking price is calculated as follows:

PT = PF + Ps (h − 1) − XdPs (h − 1) (3)

where PT is the total parking price, PF is the first-hour price rate, Ps is the price rate after
the first hour, h is total parking hours, and X is calculated as:

X = Min(bh/rc, N ) (4)

where N is the maximum value of ranges. For instance, if parking is required for a total of
20 h, the first-hour parking rate is USD 10, the rate after the first hour is USD 5, and there
Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 11 of 18

is a 10% discount for each of 5 ranges where each range consists of 3 h, the total parking
price will be
PT = 10 + (5 ∗ 19) − (5 ∗ 0.1 ∗ 5 ∗ 19) = $52.5
For long-term parking (i.e., subscriptions), a dynamic subscription rate is allocated
to correspond with demand and revenue, similarly to [46]. The objective of the strategy
is to optimize the parking revenue R = ∑kn=1 Pn where k is the number of parking spots
available for subscription and Pn is the subscription price rate of the nth parking lot. This
can be achieved by enabling bidding once or more times during selected seasonal periods.
The subscription price rate is obtained by firstly allocating the maximum bidding value as
the price rate, then reducing it to a rate that matches demand and revenue. For instance,
in the scenario where 20 clients bid USD 200 monthly, 3 clients bid USD 150 monthly,
and 7 drivers bid USD 90 monthly, the optimal pricing rate will be USD 150 monthly. A
maximum bid value will be pre-specified by the parking management to ensure fairness.
Upon setting the subscription price rate, the clients who can pay the rate Un are prioritized
based on their bidding value and time stamp in a descending order. The optimization
algorithm and maximization objective can be expressed as

Maximize R
Subject to :
(5)
k ≤ Un
Ratem ≥ Pn ; ∀n≤k

where Ratem is the maximum rate that the mth driver will pay. The sorting algorithms
Merge Sort or Heapsort [35] can be used to search for the optimal maximum value, due to
their low complexity.

4. Implementation and Evaluation

To evaluate the proposed smart parking system, Makkah city parking lots near the
Holy Mosque were considered as the case study. Specifically, the parking lot in the Ku-
dai district was selected for simulation and implementation. There are 13 parking lots
in Makkah city, with a total area of a million and a half square meters, and they can
take up to 45,000 vehicles. Kudai parking lot’s area is around 74,000 m2 with total of
2500 parking spots. Figure 6 shows parking lots and transportation stations, including
Kudai parking lot. The traffic is highly congested during the Hajj and Umrah seasons, but
the system is expected to reduce traffic congestion, especially at the parking-lot entrances.
According to a general statistical authority, the number of vehicles entering Makkah during
the 2019 Hajj season was around 32,978 [47]. The Saudi vision aims to double the total
number of pilgrims for the Hajj and Umrah season by 2022, which in turn requires better
traffic and parking management.
As a proof of concept, a simplified version of a part of the Kudai parking lot was se-
lected for experimental evaluation, as shown in Figure 7. Note that some of the components
are not shown in the figure as they are placed at the back of the parking board. The visual
sensor was not included in the proof-of-concept implementation for simplicity purposes.
The hardware components of the experiment included HC-SR04 ultrasonic and geomag-
netic sensors, an RFID-RC522 reader module, an S50 RFID card, an Adafruit Feather 32u4
with LoRa radio modules, a rechargeable Li-ion battery, a compact photovoltaic panel,
LEDs, Raspberry Pi 3, and an HP workstation.
Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 12 of 18

Figure 6. Parking lots and transportation stations near the holy mosque at Makkah city.

A Feather 32u4 LoRa board with an 868/915 MHz radio module was employed for
LoRa communication. The serial RX/TX pins of ultrasonic, geomagnetic, and RFID sensors
were connected to the Arduino serial RX/TX pins on the Adafruit Feather. Data were read
from the Arduino serial RX and transmitted through the radio. The data are received by the
onboard LoRa radio and sent through another serial port to the Raspberry Pi, which was
used as a fog node in the experiment. The node collects, processes, and sorts the data locally,
and forwards the data to the back-end server. It processes parking-spot selection, parking
availability estimation, and the hybrid pricing algorithm. A HP workstation running
Ubuntu was employed for back-end analysis to monitor and analyze the network’s overall
performance. It processes the historical data to estimate the parking availability and
accordingly allows or does not allow parking reservation. The communication module and
the sensors are supplied with power through a rechargeable Li-ion battery that is charged
by a compact photovoltaic panel. The Blynk app could be used to display the output of the
algorithms executed in the fog node.
A simulation evaluation was conducted to investigate the benefits of the proposed
parking system, specifically the slot selection and hybrid pricing algorithms. The free
open-source simulator, Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) [48] was utilized to define
each vehicle explicitly with a specific route in the map. The default behavior of vehicles in
SUMO is to drive with highest specified speed with obstacle avoidance. It also contains
a parking package to define a parking area and to route vehicles to a specific parking
spot [49]. The area of the Kudai parking lot simulated was taken from OpenStreetMap
(OSM) and inserted into SUMO to represent the simulation area. Figure 8 shows the Kudai
parking lot in the SUMO simulator.
Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 13 of 18

Figure 7. Kudai parking lot and proof-of-concept set-up.

The system was compared with the traditional parking approach in which the driver
starts searching for an available parking spot from the current location until one is found.
A parking lot with a maximum capacity of 150 parking spots was considered, where 10 and
5 vehicles/minute were the arrival and departure rates, respectively. The initial parking
availability was produced randomly in a uniform distribution with a 90% maximum rate.
The parking lot was considered full if more than 80% of parking spots were occupied. The
measured performance metrics for simulation evaluation were arrival time, searching time,
and parking revenue. The arrival time is the time spent by a vehicle in the parking area
from the entrance until a selected parking slot is reached, while the searching time is the
time spent searching for a parking spot. The parking revenue, on the other hand, is the
total revenue from all parking spots with different parking plans in a parking lot.
Figure 9 illustrates the arrival time considering different congestion rates and available
parking spots, using the proposed system and the traditional approach. The simulation
was executed until an available spot was obtained. Figure 9a shows the arrival time with
only one available parking spot, with a congestion rate between 0.1 and 0.9. It shows that
the arrival time using the proposed parking-spot selection algorithm was significantly
less than for the traditional parking search approach. The traditional search approach
consumes around 20% to 60% more time than the proposed algorithm. Although the
proposed algorithm always outperformed the traditional approach, the arrival time gap
between the two approaches became less with a higher congestion rate because it was
difficult for vehicles to move fast at all junctions. In Figure 9b, the arrival time is shown
with various available parking spots from 1 to 10 parking spots and a fixed congestion
rate of 0.8. The proposed algorithm had an arrival time that was lower than the traditional
approach in all cases. When only one parking spot was available, the arrival time of
Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 14 of 18

the proposed algorithm was notably lower compared to the traditional approach which
searches blindly for all parking spots in the area until an available spot is found. However,
the difference between the arrival times decreased gradually with increasing numbers of
parking spots because more available spots could be found.

Figure 8. Kudai parking lot in SUMO simulator.

Figure 10 shows the searching time with various available parking spots from 1 to 10
parking spots and a fixed congestion rate of 0.8. The results show that the searching time
metric and the arrival time have a similar pattern because the searching time is most of the
arrival time period. The proposed algorithm had a lower searching time and arrival time;
notably lower when only one parking spot was available. The difference between the two
approaches became less when more parking spots were available.

Figure 9. The arrival time using parking selection algorithm and traditional search approach, considering: (a) different
available parking spots, and (b) different congestion rates.
Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 15 of 18

Figure 10. Searching time with different available parking spots using parking selection algorithm
and traditional search approach.

The revenue for hybrid and fixed pricing algorithms was evaluated considering
different parking reservation requests. Here, a parking lot with a maximum capacity of
150 parking spots was considered, in which 50 spots were allocated for the long-term plan
and 100 spots for the short-term plan. Moreover, the number of parking spots available for
subscription was considered to be less than the number of the clients who could pay the
default subscription rate. The fixed pricing rate was USD 10 per hour in the short-term
plan and USD 2000 per month in the long-term plan. For the short-term plan, the dynamic
pricing was USD 10 for the first hour with a 10% discount for the remaining hours, while for
the long-term plan the bidding rate was randomly higher than the default rate. Figure 11
shows the total revenue from all parking plans, including the short-term and long-term
parking plans, compared to fixed pricing. The occupation rate was varied from 10% to
100% for both parking plans. The dynamic pricing scheme increased the revenue notably
for the long-term plan, while it was less than the fixed pricing revenue for the short-term
plan, due to the discount.

Figure 11. The revenue from the parking lot in one month with different occupation rates.
Electronics 2021, 10, 3184 16 of 18

5. Conclusions
Smart cities aim to improve the quality of life of their residents in different aspects of
life including transportation and travel services. In this context, smart parking systems
help drivers to obtain and reserve a parking spot in advance. In this paper, a smart parking
system was proposed based on a multi-layer IoT architecture with a LoRa communication
interface, to overcome the limitations of the current parking systems. The system consid-
ered different parking plans including a short-term parking plan with and without advance
reservation and a long-term parking plan. The acquired parking data were processed
through a fog computing node to facilitate obtaining the required real-time parking data.
Moreover, a dynamic pricing algorithm was introduced with aim of maximizing revenue
for the parking authority. A novel algorithm to obtain the optimal parking spot with the
minimum arrival time was also introduced. The proposed system was evaluated through
implementation and simulation of a selected area representing our case study (i.e., Kudai
parking lot). The results showed that the parking system enhanced the parking arrival time
and revenue. In future work, we plan to develop and install a test field for the proposed
parking system in our case study.

Author Contributions: Conceptualization, W.J., M.B. and M.K.; methodology, M.B., W.J., M.K. and
R.H.; software, M.B. and M.K.; validation, M.B., W.J. and R.H.; writing—original draft preparation,
M.B., M.K. and R.H.; writing—review and editing, M.B. and R.H.; project administration, M.K.;
funding acquisition, M.K. and M.B. All authors have read and agreed to the published version
of the manuscript.
Funding: This research work was funded by Makkah Digital Gate Initiative under grant no. (MDP-
IRI-10-2020). The authors gratefully acknowledge technical and financial support from the Emirate
Of Makkah Province and King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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