Parking Occupancy Prediction and Traffic Assignment in a University Environment

The fourth industrial revolution has given rise to large-scale data-driven models like smart cities and Intelligent transportation. Within these models, applications like smart parking have been growing rapidly in research and industry. However, different scenarios and environments (e.g., shopping areas, residential places, and business complexes) can require special handling due to the various factors impacting people’s schedules and behavior. In this paper, we provide an initial investigation of traffic assignment based on parking prediction for a mid-size university environment where parking is concentrated in three parking garages around the campus. Our initial investigation includes results for parking prediction using a statistical method and plans for an augmenting study using variations of Neural Networks. On top of the parking prediction layer, we propose an application layer that directs and fuses the model predictions to produce the parking options provided to the application user. The presented investigation can help the university administration in their consideration of building additional garages.