No abstract

With the increasing popularity of smart phones, Parking Reservation System (PRS) becomes practical to reduce the travel time in cruising for vacant spaces. The aim of this study is to assess the impact of PRS explicitly. This paper was started with analyzing the processes of cruising for vacant spaces and making parking reservation decisions. The vehicles were divided into two categories: the intelligent vehicles and the regular ones. Only the intelligent vehicles have the ability to make a parking reservation beforehand, while the regular ones have to cruise for vacant spaces. All involved components were treated as different agents, including vehicles, parking lots, network, and management center. Based on this, agent-based simulation was introduced to evaluate the performances of the scenarios with different penetration rates. The simulation results indicate the average travel time increases with the improvement of the penetration rates for the regular vehicles. The assessment method presented in this study would assist in promoting the performances of PRS in urban areas.

SUMMARYOperators and planners of parking guidance and information system (PGIS) often encounter the difficulty when and how to provide parking information to drivers in peak hours. The aim of this study was to assign the parking demands onto the urban network, find the positions suitable to locate the parking variable message sign (parking VMS), and try to solve the problem when to provide parking information to drivers. Parking VMS, as the most common forms of the information display terminal of PGIS, becomes critical in designing PGIS. This paper started from analyzing the relationship between the location and the performances of parking VMS. If a parking VMS is placed right along the link approaching to the divarication intersection of the subsequent "shortest path" and the previous one, the travel time declines abruptly, and the guiding compliance ratio becomes superior. Then, the network-based parking choice model for the parking VMS was proposed. Network modification and incremental assignment were used to find the divarication intersections caused by the changes of space availability. In addition, MATLAB software package (MathWorks, Inc., Natick, MA, USA) was adopted to calculate the entire process mentioned. The proposed model and the algorithm were applied to a numerical example, where the location of parking VMS was obtained.