DOI 10.4010/2016.

499
ISSN2321 3361 © 2016 IJESC

Research Article February 2016 Issue

IoT Smart Parking System for Reducing Green House Gas Emission
Prabhu Ramaswamy
Software Systems Architect
Chennai, India
prabhu.ramaswami@gmail.com

Abstract:
Rapid climate change results natural calamity and severe economic impact and threats to the life. Burning fossil fuels by the
medium of transportation contributes 1/3 of portion in increasing green house emission which ultimately causing to raise surface
temperate.
Commuters in and around the developed cities faces difficulties in finding parking lot due to lack of notification process or
disconnected parking systems with commuters. If the commuter was not able to correctly find the parking lot then it requires
making another round trip or rerouting the journey at least an additional mile to get the space. This unnecessary re-routing causes
additional burning of fuels and emits CO2 typically 411 grams per mile of travel.
This paper describes solution to smart parking system using Internet of Things (IoT) to override parking hazards and explains
how does it helps to minimize emitting greenhouse gases. IoT enables smart parking system using the system of interconnected
Raspberry Pi, Distance Sensor, Pi Camera devices together. This hardware reacts to one another collects data and transmits to
cloud storage.

Keywords: IoT Parking, Raspberry Pi, Smart Parking, IoT Sensors, Internet of Things, CO2 Emission, Green House Emission,
Smart Transportation Systems, Smart City

I. INTRODUCTION II. CONTRIBUTION OF FOSSIL FUELS IN CO2 EMISSION

IoT is enabled by Raspberry Pi world’s first open source
hardware project capable of connecting with computing
devices, digital & analogue machines using GPIO-General
Purpose Input / Output Pins. Since Raspberry Pi comes with
inbuilt ARM processor which runs Debian Linux as OS, it
could host high level programming languages such as Wiring
Pi for processing data transformed through GPIO Pins.
These Pi devices are connected to the internet will sends real
time data to the cloud using restful web services which could
be consumed by mobile applications.
Green house emission contributes to raise the surface
temperate drastically. Scientist reveals temperate raise from
the ice age to the present era is just by 2 degree centigrade.
Even for this minimal temperate raise, many
of the land surfaces turned deserts, due to melting of polar
zones surplus water to the sea invade land surfaces and taking
out lives.
International energy statistics report states 5195 Million
Metric Tons of CO2 emissions indulge the air every year in
United States where as transportation contributes 1758 MMT
CO2, contributing 33% in polluting the air.

IoT enables seamless operation in several domains where CHART I

remote monitoring & periodic assessment of machineries and CONTRIBUTION TO FUEL EMISSION BY CATEGORY
devices are required. Existence of such processes in IoT grows
in trend especially in the following areas

 Smart Roads to control speed, traffic signaling, policing

 Intelligent Parking Systems for Smart Cities
 Monitoring & Controlling remote machines & equipments
 Monitoring oil well details to measure yield
 Connected Cars for accident prevention
 Automated Cars or Driverless cars
 Predictive Analysis to calculate fault tolerance
 Continuous logging of mission critical systems
 Smart agriculture measuring moisture, temperature etc
 Real time assessment of supply versus demand
 Fraud prevention in retail domain

2046 http://ijesc.org/
 III. SHORTCOMINGS OF CURRENT PARKING
SYSTEMS
For discussion let us consider New York City where there are
81875 metered parking spaces scattered across different
buildings at different locations. Though there are many, some
of them may be occupied some of them are vacant. For the
commuters finding the right place for parking is difficult
considering the following reasons
 Parking systems are separately maintained and not
interconnected
 Knowing the nearer parking lot is difficult and
though assisted through maps, looking for space is a
difficult task
 Though the right multi storey parking lot is
identified, driver need to take up and downs around
the floors to find the available space.
 It will not be possible to the driver to know where
and which slot is available before deciding to park
the vehicle. Hence once missed the parking lot driver
has to take search on multiple places unnecessarily
 Several of street parking systems are setup with
manual metering though which cannot assure parking
charges are collected upfront.
 Existing meter system makes the user to extend
parking hours in advance which makes little difficult
to the user
VI. SMART PARKING SYSTEM
To bring visual imprint of smart parking lot, each slot in the
parking system will be controlled through ultrasonic distance
sensors & raspberry pi camera connected through raspberry pi
devices. Internet enabled raspberry pi devices will post the
presence of vehicle to the central parking system mediator
with the number plate details.
The sensors & camera will be connected to Raspberry Pi
device through the GPIO pins to send and receive distance
details from the ultrasound sensor & to retrieve image snap of
number plate from the camera
Raspberry Pi installed with Wiring Pi APIs will be using
OCR4J for rasterizing incoming image feed to find the number
plate details of the car.
This implementation to be considered as economic looking at
the low price sensors used on this implementation
DIAGRAM I
CONCEPTUAL SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE

IV. CONSEQUENCES OF PRESENT PARKING MODEL

 Increased traffic & excess re-routing makes
additional consumption of fuel and being a factor for
CO2 emission

V. TRAFFIC RE-ROUTING CAUSES HIGH CO2

EMISSION
As per the Screen line traffic report of New York County,
number of inbound traffic to the New York City region was
1,416,277, where majority of them are passenger cars.
Considering an average 5% of vehicles foresee issues in
identifying parking space, it is about 140,995 vehicles needs
smart assistance in getting proper parking space.
On average driving passenger vehicles emits about 411 grams
of CO2 per mile considering the fuel capacity as 21.6 miles per
gallon.
So if re-routing a vehicle takes approximately 1 mile to find
next parking lot, current parking systems makes 70813 miles of
travel considering the whole New York traffic. This causes
considerable impact to the green house emission. Typically by
the formula

Miles x Emission per Mile = Total CO2 Emission

i.e. 70813 x 411 = 29104492 grams or 29 Metric Tons

Thus NY traffic every day emits 29 Metric Tons of CO2 due

to improper planning of parking system, traffic rerouting &
lack of smart parking systems.

2047 http://ijesc.org/
 VII. PROTOTYPE OF SMART PARKING SYSTEM
DIAGRAM 2
SMART PARKING PROTOTYPE
Images are Illustrative Purpose, Not to Scale
1. Raspberry Pi device configured with Ultrasound
Sensor initiates consecutive sound waves to identify
object presence to know if it is closer.
2. Sensor recognizes the location distance and sends
back to Pi, further If identified that sensor produces
same parameter fur further few seconds it is
confirmed as lot to be booked
3. Raspberry Pi sends notification to the Pi Camera
which is hosted approximately straight forward to the
vehicle number plate to take snap of the number plate
details
4. Raspberry Pi camera takes the picture of number
plate and sends the GIF image to raspberry Pi
5. Raspberry Pi makes use of wiring Pi to receive
incoming image file and invokes OCR4J framework
for rasterizing the image to find the numbers on it.
Lot details, vehicle number will be sending to the
2048
cloud storage through Restful web service which is
accessible by other motorist to know the remaining
available parking lots.
6. Other users who commute through the traffic could
know the availability of remaining slots in the
parking lot and could get in easily
VIII. PARTICIPATING SOFTWARE & HARDWARE
COMPONENTS
Raspberry Pi - Credit Card Sized computing machine
embedded with ARM processor running on Debian Linux OS.
Pi Device capable of connecting digital devices to receive and
send signals through 26 General Purpose Input/output PINS
through voltage modulation of binary formats.
Wiring Pi - C Library written especially for accessing GPIO
PINs for Raspberry Pi. It facilitates to read even analogue
signals through the Pi device. There are several frameworks
extending the WiringPI to access GPIO signals. PI4J is an
example that we leverage here in our proposal for reading
sensor signals.
Ultrasonic Distance Sensor – Device operating on the
principle of BATs the way of finding distance by calculating
the time difference between sending and receiving time of
sounds at particular frequency. We use this device for distance
measurement between the car and parking curb. This sensor
will have in build sender & receiver components to get the
travel time of sound between the origin and destination. PI4J
will calculate the distance using the formula
Distance (cm) = (Travel Time /2)*Speed of Sound
Raspberry Pi Camera – Camera Module capable of taking HD
1080P Photos and videos and could be controlled
programmatically. Camera device will be connect to the
Raspberry board through HDMI Cable and could be controlled
through PI4J controller modules to operate and get image
output back for processing.
OCR4J – Optical character recognizer for Java is an Apache
open source project capable of extracting letters and characters
from the given image by rasterizing. Captured number plate
detail by the Pi camera will be processed by this framework
for extracting the number plate details.
Smart Parking App – Mobile thick client application for
identifying available parking lot & slot details. This
application will fetch details over the cloud as rest services
IX. CONCLUSION
 IoT is the great enabler to create interconnected digital
systems and greatly helps to reduce green house emission
to save environment as well saves fuel economy
 Implementing the system will reduce 55 Metric Tons of
CO2 emission in NY City alone every day to improvise
healthy environment
 Capabilities of current IoT parking system could be
brought to the next level by
 Making automatic billing where the driver will get billing
information over the gate by enter & exit time.
http://ijesc.org/
 Also in scenarios of parallel parking lots raspberry Pi
camera could focus and take the snap of the parking lots
from top level to see which parking slot numbers are
vacant and will inform the travelers to use
 This could also be leveraged to enforce law to see
whether the vehicles are parked as per the specification
and ensures it does not disturbs traffic
 Present a day meter readings could not be always audited
but using the automated IoT we could see whether any of
the parked vehicles are missed to make payment in
advance by reading the slot number before & after
parking the vehicle
X. REFERENCES
[1]. Inventory of New York Green House Emission, Nov 2014
Edition, http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc/downloads/pdf/
NYC_GHG_Inventory_2014.pdf
[2].International Energy Statistics
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=5
&pid=5&aid=8
[3].International Energy Statistics
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=5
&pid=5&aid=8
[12] Green House Gas Emission from Typical passenger
Vehicle http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/climate/documents/
420f14040a.pdf
XI. DISCLAIMER
Envisioning of smart parking system is absolutely based on
the thought process of author and does not derived from other
alternative sources
Accuracy of data relevant to vehicle movement, emission
details and other historical references are based on DMV &
transport council of NY and this data has been used to
measure the velocity of benefit may be yielded by IoT
solution.
Facts on figures referred in this paper are for reference hence
this paper primarily focuses on Smart Parking Solution using
Raspberry Pi and its subordinated frameworks.
Considering the focus of this paper on IoT infrastructure,
details about mobile application & cloud eco systems are not
discussed much in detail.
IBM Blue mix is the preparatory cloud ecosystem of IBM
corporation and specification about Blue Mix here is to
illustrate the purpose and in place of this any other cloud
systems could fit it.

[4].Inventory of New York Green House Emission

http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/pdfs/usinventoryreport/
US-GHG-Inventory-2015-Chapter-Executive-Summary.pdf

[5].Manhattan Core Public Parking Study

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/mn_core/mncore_study.pdf

[6].New York Metered Parking Spaces as of year 2011

http://www.streetsblog.org/2011/03/22/new-york-has-81875-
metered-parking-spaces-and-millions-of-free-on

[7].DMV Traffic Statistics http://dmv.ny.gov/about-

dmv/statistical-summarieses/

[8] New York Traffic Statistics

http://animalnewyork.com/2014/data-reveals-worst-times-
traffic-nyc/

[9].Business Insider, Banning Personal Cars in NY

http://www.businessinsider.in/Its-time-to-ban-personal-cars-
in-New-York-City/articleshow/47727447.cms

[10]. New York City Screen line Traffic Flow 2013

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nyc-screenline-
report-2013.pdf

[11]. New York Bridge Traffic Report 2013

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/bridge-traffic-
report-2013.pdf

2049 http://ijesc.org/