EAGER: A Living Lab for Smartphone-based Parking Management Services

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Searching for parking is a real struggle faced by many drivers, especially in urban areas. Smartphone-based advanced parking management services may provide information on real-time availability and prices of parking spaces and guide motorists to open parking spaces. This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project will explore the potential of such smartphone-based parking management services to deepen understanding of travelers' parking behaviors and advance the analytical foundations and methodologies for modeling and assessing parking solutions. This work integrates various stakeholders (individual travelers, parking industry, transportation agencies, and technology developers) and multiple technologies (retrieving real-time data from both users and agencies, predicting future parking availability, providing information and guidance through smartphone application, and analyzing parking games via both analytical and simulation models). As a living lab, this project will provide unique opportunities to collect data on parking search behaviors, discover emerging scenarios of smartphone-based parking management services, and assess the impacts of such systems in a real environment. Additionally, it fills a critical gap in validating and calibrating the theoretical and simulation models using real data. By engaging end users, local transportation agencies, industry, and technology developers, it will generate new knowledge regarding how various stakeholders are interrelated and interact with each other. The project is expected to promote education and human resources development in STEM fields, contribute resources towards parking information infrastructure, and improve user experience in parking.The project involves three main activities: 1) Staged deployment of a prototype Android parking guidance application. The team will work closely with Arizona State University (ASU) Parking and Transit Services to implement a three-stage pilot deployment around the ASU main campus located in downtown Tempe, AZ. This work will engage end users, local transportation agencies, industry, and technology developers. 2) Model validation and verification. Through the smartphone application, data on individual travelers' parking preferences will be collected and used to validate the stochastic parking models. Parking behavior models/parameters will also be examined in order to calibrate an agent-based simulation tool. 3) Assessing improvement of stakeholder experience. For individual travelers, the process of searching for parking will be quantified in terms of a range of performance measures (such as cruising time, number of parking facilities visited, cruising speed, etc.). For agencies, the congestion caused by cruising for parking will be assessed using a mix of real data collected from the work and transportation network models, including existing models.