An IoT Raspberry Pi-based parking management system for smart campus

Parking slots have become a widespread problem in urban development. In this context, the growth of vehicles inside the university's campus is rapidly outpacing the available parking spots for students and staff as well. This issue can be mitigated by the introduction of parking management for the smart campus which targets to assist individually match drivers to vacant parking slots, saving time, enhance parking space utilization, decrease management costs, and alleviate traffic congestion. This paper develops an IoT Raspberry Pi-based parking management system (IoT-PiPMS) to help staff/students to easily find available parking spots with real-time vision and GPS coordinates, all by means of a smartphone application. Our system composes of Raspberry Pi 4 B+ (RPi) embedded computer, Pi camera module, GPS sensor, and ultrasonic sensors. In the IoT-PiPMS, RPi 4 B+ is used to gather and process data input from the sensors/camera, and the data is uploaded via Wi-Fi to the Blynk IoT server. Ultrasonic sensors and LEDs are exploited to detect the occupancy of the parking spots with the support of the Pi camera to ensure data accuracy. Besides, the GPS module is installed in the system to guide drivers to locate parking areas through the Blynk App. that discovers parking spaces availability over the Internet. The system prototype is fabricated and tested practically to prove its functionality and applicability. According to the results, the IoT-PiPMS can effectively monitor the occupancy of outdoor parking spaces in the smart campus environment, and its potency in terms of updating the data to the IoT server in real-time is also validated.. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.