Cooperative car parking using vehicle-to-vehicle communication: An agent-based analysis

In this paper, we introduce a decentralized car parking approach for vast car park areas based on cooperation among vehicles through vehicle-to-vehicle communication, called Cooperative Car Parking (CoPark). In CoPark, the task of finding car parking spaces inside a large car parking area is done via smart agents in vehicles opportunistically cooperating with each other to locate parking spaces as near as possible to the final destination with reduced searching time. We comprehensively investigate a range of car parking circumstances and situations in our simulations to evaluate the proposed CoPark approach. We show that by strategic cooperation between agents in the CoPark approach, greater satisfaction can be achieved in terms of individual and social benefits, in the form of reduced search times for car park spaces and reduced walking distances from where cars are parked to a destination building.