Smart Parking using Magnetometers and Mobile Applications

Abstract: People are using cars for transportation every day all over the world. This leads to a constant demand for parking. In public areas there are usually designated places for parking that many people share. The shared parking spots with the best location and cheapest fee thereby become attractive. Some motorists cruise around hoping to find an attractive spot that is not occupied. This cruising is generating a lot of unnecessary Carbon Dioxide as well as causing other problems on the streets. This thesis proposes a solution to these problems by providing motorists with real-time information about the availability of spots in parking houses through a smartphone application. In order to reach as many potential users as possible the smartphone application was developed with PhoneGap and standard web technologies. To achieve scalability on the back end Google App Engine was used. By focusing on multi-story car parks and parking lots the cost for deploying the system is inexpensive due to the low demand for sensors compared to those that require a sensor for each parking spot.