Parking support model for open parking lots

Parking is a common process performed by vehicle drivers when they arrive at their destination. It is considered to be the last mile transportation problem of personal vehicles. Some of the common problems observed by drivers are additional cruising, congestion, pollution, and driver frustration. This thesis is focused on open parking lots that provide free parking spaces. Since parking spaces are provided free, open parking lots are in high demand leading to additional cruising and pollution. One of the primary reasons for these problems is the lack of information on parking availability. Such information can be provided using a parking support model, or a smart parking system. As open parking lots do not provide any direct return on investments, no parking support models were available on the market. Therefore, this thesis aims to develop a parking support model suitable for open parking lots which can facilitate in providing real-time and short-term forecast of parking availability. This thesis also examines the magnitude of additional cruising and CO2 emissions observed in an open parking lot. A thermal camera was utilized for collecting data on open parking lots as it is not susceptible to varying illumination and environmental conditions. Since there were no pre-trained algorithms for enabling object detection using thermal camera images, a dataset was created with varying environmental and illumination conditions. This dataset was utilized by deep learning algorithms to facilitate multi-object, real-time detection. The developed parking support model facilitates in providing a real-time and short-term forecast of parking availability. Despite the use of low volume of data, the methods utilized in this thesis facilitated providing better detection and forecasting results. Algorithms, such as ResNet18 and Yolo, facilitated in providing real-time, multi-object detection with high accuracy. Similarly, a short-term forecast of parking availability was provided for the open parking lot using methods such as the Ensemble-based method, LSTM and SARIMAX. Ensemble-based method and LSTM provided better test prediction results with lower errors compared to SARIMAX. A new CO2 emissions model was proposed to estimate the magnitude of emissions observed at an open parking lot. The mean CO2 emissions of additional cruising is 2.7 times more than optimal cruising. Despite the individual CO2 emissions of vehicles being lower, aggregating CO2 emissions from multiple vehicles leads to higher pollution. This problem can be reduced by utilizing the parking support model