Automated Vehicle Parking System

The Automated Vehicle Parking System had been conceived with the view to automate the manual workflows involved in the management of Vehicle Parking Lots. It drastically reduces the effort, inaccuracies, error-prone tendencies, delays and overheads involved in performing the same tasks by hand. It was aimed to provide a fully automated system that was capable of checking in and out of vehicles entering and exiting the designated parking lot, and recording relevant information about them. Revenue calculation and data entry is automated to the largest possible extent. Only minimum intervention from the manual user is required, with a possibility of eliminating it altogether with further advancement in the technology encompassed by the project, and supporting hardware. A rich and easy-to-use GUI aids the user in navigating the system easily and comprehensively. Features such as multiple searching and viewing options further add to the capabilities of the system and thereby also help in reducing the entry time. Transactions concurrency and their unambiguous nature have been carefully balanced and user sessions are purposefully managed. Direct implementation of the printing code helps the entry clerks as well as managers/administrators, to print the parking slips, reports and user information as and when required. With a marked difference in the types of users, and user privileges, the system provides a clear hierarchy and shields private data and administration details from those users, who are not permitted or concerned with them. A lot of data mining options have also been included, in the form of managerial reports. These provide an insight into the daily working subroutines of the system, such as the total revenue collection, employee sign in times, total vehicles parked in the lot, etc. on a Daily, Monthly, or Yearly basis. The most fundamental factor, that sets this system apart from others, is the fact that it is a real life application, designed with a specific target audience of India, taken into consideration. It makes no assumptions about the perfectionist implementation of the system, and also factors in human tendency. For instance, it was considered that the system would automatically allocate a parking slot to each vehicle. However, this was ruled out in view of the fact that human error or misdemeanor may lead to a vehicle owner parking elsewhere, rather than the designated spot, which would lead to utter chaos. Similarly, the revenue rates have been formulated keeping the standard manual parking rates in India in mind. However, these can be changed as per requirement as well.