Is parking difficult? IoT technology makes parking easy!

In various domestic cities, especially large and medium-sized cities, parking is the most frequent rigid demand in a city. The market space is quite huge and has the characteristics of a typical entrance market. Based on the calculation that there are 170 million domestic cars and the annual parking fee for car owners is 3,000 yuan, the annual static market space for parking fees is about 400 billion yuan. In real life, problems such as difficulty in parking, difficulty in finding empty parking spaces, uneven use of parking spaces, and low parking space utilization rates are also quite prominent. Judging from the statistics of the four major cities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, although parking difficulties in these cities are quite prominent, parking problems are still very prominent. The vacancy rate of berths remains as high as 44.6%.

In the current parking management market, the coverage rate of parking lots that realize intelligent management is only 7%, and the technical means to realize intelligent management of parking lots are mainly concentrated in conventional technical forms such as automatic license plate number recognition, and are not truly A smart parking service that relies on the Internet of Things or mobile Internet platform and the user’s mobile APP to realize interaction. However, with the increasing maturity of Internet of Things technology, long-standing problems such as parking difficulties in big cities are gradually being overcome.

“Internet of Things Parking Lot” relies on the Internet of Things and cloud computing technology, wireless communication technology, computer network technology and other advanced means, combined with the cloud parking service platform, to stagger the use of each parking lot with each other, make full use of the city’s idle resources, and help solve parking problems. Undoubtedly one.

The so-called “Internet of Things Parking Lot”, or smart parking, simply means applying automation technology to urban parking space collection, management, query, reservation and navigation services to maximize the utilization of parking space resources, maximize parking lot profits and Optimized parking services for car owners. At the same time, smart parking also performs well in the field of staggered parking. The government encourages surrounding commercial and office buildings to share parking spaces with residential areas, and guides enterprises, institutions, and public institutions to open internal parking lots to the outside world. It also allows individual parking spaces to be rented out at staggered hours. and obtain benefits.

Smart parking can also help cities reduce congestion and pollution. With the help of smart parking, car owners no longer need to drive around to find parking spaces. In addition, smart parking can also help car owners find their own cars. They only need to enter the license plate number at the inquiry machine or QR code scanning in the parking lot to quickly obtain parking space information and electronic map display. Parking lot payment will also become very convenient, whether it is POS machine, parking lot self-service payment machine, mobile payment or QR code payment. Smart parking lots use Internet of Things technology to directly improve the quality of life of urban citizens.

We can explain smart parking by dividing it into city level, warehouse level and parking space level. Next, the IoT technology in smart parking will be discussed from these three levels.

city ​​level

At the city level, parking equipment data is uploaded to the city platform through the Internet of Things. The government city-level cloud platform and the parking enterprise cloud platform are connected online to obtain parking lot data, forming a “one network” pattern for the city’s parking lots, providing online Public welfare services make it easier for the public to find parking spaces, and can also solve the problem of “pay evasion” by some parking users. It mainly applies NB-IoT technology and LoRa technology.

NB-IoT technology and LoRa technology: The NB-IoT technology and LoRa technology that emerged this year are technologies used in city-level smart parking. NB-IoT technology takes advantage of the low power consumption, wide coverage, and high density of narrow-band communication to make parking equipment directly accessible. With the Internet, geomagnetism, ground locks, charging piles, and gates can continuously transmit information to the network platform. LoRa technology has formed industry standards and a common platform in recent years, allowing communities to be connected to form a large network.

Farm level

Depot-level application scenarios include parking lots, parking garages, roadside parking, etc., which mainly use RFID, license plate recognition technology and non-stop electronic toll collection (ETC) technology.

RFID: Introducing RFID technology and taking advantage of its feature of automatic identification without manual intervention, it can realize intelligent access management of parking lots, change the inefficiency of entrance and exit traffic caused by entering the door to park, pick up the card, and go out to pay the card in the traditional parking lot, and improve the traffic efficiency.

License plate recognition technology and non-stop electronic toll collection (ETC) technology: These two IoT technologies are mainly used for smart parking at the depot level. License plate recognition technology uses cameras to capture license plates or ETCs to accurately identify vehicles, record vehicle entry and exit times for accurate charging, and allow vehicles to pass quickly without stopping for manual recording. It is worth mentioning that ETC technology is an important technology that has developed rapidly in the field of smart parking barriers in recent years. However, in recent years, the core technology of star-level “vertical circulation” three-dimensional parking garages is still a mechanical technology, and intelligent control still uses traditional PLC control.

Parking space level

At the parking level, there are two technologies: smart parking lock technology and geomagnetic technology.

Smart parking lock technology: Use Bluetooth technology to control the lifting and lowering of the car lock. When the car lock is raised, the vehicle cannot enter the parking space. When the car lock is lowered, the corresponding vehicle enters.

Geomagnetic technology: It uses wireless sensor technology to identify the earth’s magnetic field. Once a vehicle is detected, billing will begin. This requires that a set of sensors must be installed in every parking space. These sensors report data to nearby drivers in real time so that drivers can find available parking spaces in the shortest possible time. In this case, these battery-powered sensors are required to communicate over long distances and provide very precise accuracy while minimizing false alarms.