A Game Theoretic Approach for Parking Spot Search with Limited Parking Lot Information

We propose a game theoretic approach to address the problem of searching for available parking spots in a parking lot and picking the “optimal” one to park. The approach relies on limited information provided by the parking lot, i.e., its layout and the current number of cars in it. Due to the fact that such information is or can be easily made available for many structured parking lots, the proposed approach can be applicable without requiring major updates to existing parking facilities. For large parking lots, a sampling based strategy is integrated with the proposed approach to overcome the associated computational challenge. The proposed approach is compared against a state-of-the-art heuristic-based parking spot search strategy through simulation studies and demonstrates its advantage in terms of achieving lower cost function values.