Incentivizing Truthfulness in Crowdsourced Parking Ecosystems

Limited parking space in urban environments has a severe social and environmental impact, because of time loss and unnecessary pollution while looking for free parking spaces. In a recent effort, we have developed the SocialPARK ecosystem to tackle this problem through the activation of a community of interacting citizens, parking companies and municipalities. SocialPARK offers an integrated platform for the provision of personalized parking functionalities as a service, auditing parking availability information through a crowdsourcing approach that gathers relevant information provided by users, parking vendors and municipalities. In this context, a central challenge in delivering trustworthy parking services is to ensure a truthful behavior of the involved (possibly unreliable) users. Towards this direction, we present two rewarding schemes that provably incentivize users to behave truthfully. Both schemes are based on virtual credits (points) that users earn for providing parking availability information. Apart from incentivizing truthful behavior, our schemes cater for point circulation, do not allow point overaccumulation, and prevent malicious users to aggregate points by misreporting.