Swarm intelligence in the cloud

It takes an average of ten minutes to find a vacant parking space in German cities like Munich, Hamburg, or Cologne. It even takes up to 15 minutes in Italy. Drivers in German cities drive around 4.5 kilometers of unnecessary distance while searching for a vacant parking space. A route that corresponds to 14 orbits around the world can be created in only one city district in just one year. The search for a parking space thus accounts for about one third of all traffic in inner cities. This puts a strain on drivers, roads, and the environment. And air quality has in fact become a major issue, especially in cities that are already over-crowded like London. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has therefore announced comprehensive measures.

Connectivity over the Internet of Things now offers support. After all, vehicles will be increasingly connected over the next few years. The management consultancy Gartner learned that around 61 million vehicles per year will be equipped with new Wi-Fi access — ex factory or as a retrofitted solution — as early as 2020. This would be nearly a tenfold increase compared to 2015. “Data is the solution to the parking problem,” says Prof. Graham Cookson, Chief Economist for EMEA at INRIX. Its so-called “Connected Parking” system is based on the swarm intelligence of vehicles that connect via the cloud and make the search faster and more stress-free.

Today, we often use our mobile phones to park. Start-ups such as the Cologne-based company Ampido or ParkU from Berlin have developed platforms in Germany on which private individuals can rent their parking spaces. Other vendors use barriers to count incoming and outgoing cars and pass on this information via an app. Carmaker Porsche also recognized the opportunities that connected parking offers and recently invested a large sum of money in the start-up Evopark. It replaces paper tickets with a parking card that automatically opens barriers in cooperating parking garages. The respective app also shows free parking spaces and can navigate the driver directly to them if he wants.

Nevertheless, such parking services are unable to track public parking spaces because they don’t have such barriers. This is where the Bosch service Community-based Parking comes into play. With it, the cars can also find public parking spaces by themselves and even report vacant spaces on the roadside. The sensors of the parking assistant are used for this purpose. The information is then entered into a digital parking space card via the cloud and made available to all vehicles that participate in the service. The results appear in the display and can be filtered by price, parking space size, or special requirements such as parking for a parent or electrical charging stations. After choosing a parking space, the user will be navigated directly to it.

Those who prefer can also park their cars at the next Park+Ride car park and head for the city by using public transportation. A pilot project was launched in the Stuttgart region at the beginning of 2016 that informs drivers about vacant Park+Ride parking spaces via real-time traffic data. Sensors were installed in the parking spaces that can detect whether they are occupied. The occupancy data will be evaluated and assessed for whether this real-time information actually convinces more drivers to take buses and trains by June 2018.