Finding parking has been a major hassle for drivers in many urban environments for decades. For example, studies conducted in 11 major cities revealed that the average time to search for curbside parking was 8.1 minutes and cruising for these parking spaces accounted for 30% of the traffic congestion in those cities, on average. Each parking slot generated 4,927 vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per year, and the overall increase in traffic is obtained by multiplying this number by the number of parking slots in the city (e.g., 35,000 in Chicago). Motivated by these factors and enabled by the current revolution in wireless communication, sensor networks, and mobile computing, an interdisciplinary team will investigate a number of core algorithmic, game-theoretic, and computational complexity issues to address parking slot selection problems. Thus, this project seeks to contribute to development of more efficient urban transportation systems.
The technical merits of the proposal include the investigation and analysis of real-time distributed competition for spatial resources. The competitive nature of the problem leads to a dynamic multi-player game-theoretic framework to analyze the quality of a solution. The investigators will formulate computational problems, study their mathematical properties, design efficient algorithms for them, and implement resulting algorithms to assess accuracy and efficiency. In particular, partly inspired by Newton's laws of gravitation, the investigators will research a broad class of parking navigation strategies loosely termed as the Gravitational Parking Paradigms.
The final goal of this project is to develop the theoretical underpinnings of applications that, given the locations of parking slots, will guide a driver to a most appropriate parking slot. Other components of the project include the integration of research and education via several means such as course and curriculum development, effective dissemination of research, mentoring undergraduate and graduate students, and promoting diversity in related research and educational activities.
