Where to park? minimizing the expected time to find a parking space

Quickly finding a free parking spot that is close to a desired target location can be a difficult task. This holds for human drivers and autonomous cars alike. In this paper, we investigate the problem of predicting the occupancy of parking spaces and exploiting this information during route planning. We propose an MDP-based planner that considers route information as well as the occupancy probabilities of parking spaces to compute the path that minimizes the expected total time for finding an unoccupied parking space and for walking from the parking location to the target destination. We evaluated our system on real world data gathered over several days in a real parking lot. We furthermore compare our approach to three parking strategies and show that our method outperforms the alternative behaviors.

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