#SmartCities Hack Winner Showcase: Team Parkwhere #2

This is the fifth in a six-part  series which will showcase the projects built by the Top 6 teams of the  #SmartCities Hackathon. The Smart Cities hack was a two event hackathon  organized by Hackmakers dedicated to finding innovative solutions to  generate more awareness, stronger communications and quicker responses  for tomorrow’s smart cities.‍

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Watch their submission video here

Challenge Addressed

Smart Administration

Citizens’ are increasingly expecting  higher quality services and responses to their needs; be it smarter  governance, intelligent mobility or an overall safer city to live. The  Smart Administration Challenge category can cover solutions that help  cities manage public administration issues.

Problem Statement

• In  most scenarios, on an average trip to town, a driver would spend 25  minutes looking for a car parking lot, especially during the peak hours
• More than 185,700 motorists face the issue of congested car parks and inconsistent parking information on a daily basis
• 87% of the motorists would try another car park if they had an alternative to their current ones
• All this leaves the commuters with more than 4 million minutes wasted daily just looking for a car park

Solution

Parkwhere is an interactive mobile app with

• Intuitive UI that informs users of car park availability, rates and location
• It also conducts analysis of peak hours at the parkings
• Comes with a knowledge sharing mechanism and consensus algorithm to update information based on user experience
  

How does the Application Work?

• When first opening the app, type in the location where you want to go
• The  app will show us the nearest and available car parks, along with the  details such as how many lots does it have, what is the current  occupancy at the moment and what are the peak timings of that car park
• To  see better alternatives, switch over to other car park locations which  will be shown in the app and check the details of those.

The  details and analytics would be given in brief so that it is easy and  convenient for the user to go through and make an informed decision

• If the given alternatives are not favorable, you can provide your most favorable location using the app’s consensus algorithm

Solution Architecture

As seen in the diagram below:

• The cloud technology is heavily leveraged upon in the application
• Firstly  the app gathers the real time data about car parks in various regions  via the gantries in car parks all over the region.
• In  case a car park does not have a gantry, an IoT device can be placed  instead of the gantry which would eventually perform the same function
• Once the app has car park information, it can combine it with rates and location information and send it forward to the user
• If  any of the dimension are not favorable for the user, the user are  always free to provide their feedback (eg. changing the location)
• Once the information of feedback is received, the outdated information is updated based on the number of feedback it gets
• This is the Wikipedia Model of Knowledge Sharing
  

Tools Used

Business Impact

‘A green and efficient transport solution for all’ is the motive of Parkwhere. These are the few ways it aims to achieve it:

• Save hours of parking for motorists in busy areas
• Businesses in the area can expect to receive more traffic, as users of the app will to find a car park space more quickly
• Lesser carbon emission from idle vehicles in and outside the congested car parks and on the streets
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Don’t forget to check out our Previous Winner Showcase Blogs for the Smart Cities Hackathon 2021:

1. Team GTPLUS & WYHIL – 3rd Position in Smart Cities Hackathon 2021
2. Team Sheldonopolis – 4th Position in Smart Cities Hackathon 2021
3. Team Dream Green – 5th Position in Smart Cities Hackathon 2021