Integrated RFID-IoT Powered Car Parking Management System for Smart Cities

In the dawn of the 21st century coupled with the rapid development of the Internet, more-so Internet and Communication Technology (ICT), has provided us with the capability to do things that were not possible a couple of years ago. Moreover, the coming of age of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and cloud computing has given rise to the possibility of connectivity of diverse devices integrated to perform complex controls and tasks. These later day technologies when coupled to RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) give us tremendous power in the way we communicate and do things. RFID and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) enabled system will provide an automated system for parking management. In recent years, these technologies have found their way into the realm of infrastructure and architectural & building technology, and thus, propelling the development of smart buildings giving rise to smart cities worldwide. Looking ahead, smart buildings will not only improve a consumer's life quality, but are also expected to encourage the emergence of more advanced communication, security and monitoring e.g., sensor fusion technologies that when integrated with device-specific data for development of built-environment are likely to create ample market opportunity, apart from providing secure environment suitable for human comfort smart-cities built-environment. These applications not only give rise to a market opportunity for advanced sensor fusion technologies including comfort sensing, infrared sensing, inertial sensing, and voice recognition, and security management, but also make proactive sensing, smart determination, and complex automatic control possible. Global economic growth have seen great leap in urbanization and rapid development of mega cities, with population of human and vehicles growth, which severely strains the existing infrastructure both roads and parking spaces, thus locating a parking space is nightmare in major urban centers, especially at peak time, which leads to energy, time, money wastage. In this paper, we’re going to look at methods that are useful in solving this problem using integrated sensors circuit, RFID, IR sensors, AI, OCR and IoT. IR sensor is used to locate car with details accessed remotely through IoT, which also provide parking free space information; RFID is used to detect the car details, while OCR is used to recognize characters. The IoT also maintains vehicle information, with IA for autonomous decision support. Vehicle security is maintained by verifying the vehicle details against stolen vehicles’ database.