A novel parking system designed for smart cities

A parking system is of great significance for an intelligent transportation in smart cities. This paper presents a novel parking system designed for smart cities with the technology Internet of things. To ensure its openness, reliability and networking accessibility, the parking system adopts a framework of Internet of things and cloud computing. The framework is divided into four levels: parking application system level, Internet of things platform level, networking level and device level. A parking guidance function is added to the parking system to enhance its economy, energy saving and convenience. The paper presents a parking guidance method with an improved ant colony algorithm. The method takes the shortest and the fewest turns into account. Hence it can point out an optimal path for a car. The simulation results show that the parking guidance method based on improved ant colony algorithms is effective. Moreover, the paper also illustrates the main functions and how to design human machine interfaces of the parking system.