An intelligent parking assistant

In big cities, parking is a very challenging problem to most people especially for visitors who are new to these cities. Most people today will not get lost in a big city due to the widely use of smart devices But to find a nearby parking spot which is close to the place you want to visit can be a hard task. Not just smart devices like smart phone become popular, we can expect the autonomous vehicles will become popular a norm in the very near future, an internet based parking system is now on demand. There are parking assistance available now on internet. Most of these systems ask user to enter information such as where you are heading to, when you plan to arrive, how to charge you and then make reservation for you, etc. The challenge is how we build an intelligent system which is compact, fast responsive, and smart enough to help user to find and route user (or auto-driven car) to a nearby parking place whether it is a garage, surface lot or on the street. In this report, we propose an intelligent parking assistance system as a component of the future smart cities. We use MEAN stack to implement a prototype parking system. MEAN is JavaScript based technology which stands for MongoDB, Express], AngularJS, and NodeJS. We develop such a parking assist application purely using web based technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and its open sourced frameworks such as node.js, bootstrap, jQuery, jQuery UI etc. Since that real time aerial image are not available so we use simulation to find parking information on open surface lots and street parking.