IH02-RabiaSiddiqi

From IEOR 170 Spring 2007

Homework 2 - Project Proposal

Parking Garage Efficiency

I always dread entering parking garages on busy days because I never know how long it will take me to find a parking spot. There have been times when I have circled for twenty minutes, trying every floor before I finally came across a vacant space. That does not mean that no parking was available during those twenty minutes. I just did not know where to go. This is a common problem of parking garages. Because it is impossible to know on which floor and in which region an available parking spot is located, everyone just has to rely on luck to lead them to the right place. The first person to enter the parking garage will not necessarily be the first to find a spot. This bothers me because I think public services should be allocated on a first-come first-serve.

A good solution for this would be to assign a parking space for each car. The easiest way to do this is have the location of a vacant parking space listed on the ticket that the driver receives as he enters the garage. When the driver reaches the parking space, he can insert the ticket into a slot there. This way the parking garage’s electronic system will know that there is a car parked in that space and will not assign that space to anyone else. Since it will take a few minutes for the driver to reach the designated parking spot, the system will also wait ten minutes after assigning a space for the driver to park before giving that space to a new driver. When the driver is ready to leave the parking garage, he can push a button to retrieve the ticket, which can be used to pay the cashier as he leaves the garage. If there are no available spaces, the machine that gives the tickets would instead notify the incoming driver that the garage is full through a flashing message on its display.

There are still a few problems that can occur with this design. The first is that if the parking garage is very large and the driver is unfamiliar with it, he or she may still have trouble finding the parking space. Suppose that the floors are labeled with letters and each space on a floor has a number. So an example of a parking space label is C25. If a driver were trying to find this spot, it should not be too difficult to get to the correct floor, but it could be confusing to find the specific spot depending on how the numbering is arranged. To make it a little easier for the driver to find the space, there will also be an electronic map in front of the driver as he or she is taking the ticket from the machine. This machine will have the entrance and exit of the garage labeled and have a flashing light where the parking is located. This way the driver will not only have the written location of the space, but will also have a mental picture of where it is.

Another potential problem is that even if drivers are assigned certain parking spaces, if they find other ones first, they may just choose to park there instead. It is possible that just before a driver does this, the machine assigns that second parking space to someone else. How can we prevent drivers from parking in the wrong parking space? To solve this problem, when the driver parks in the space and enters the ticket into the nearby slot, the machine will check if the driver was indeed assigned that parking space. If not, the machine will reject the ticket and tell the driver to park in the correct spot. Initially the staff of the parking garage may have to fine a few drivers for parking in the wrong spot or failing to insert their ticket into the slot. However, if all parking garages ultimately adopt this design, people will eventually get used to it and fewer mistakes will be made.

This design would save some time for drivers who would otherwise have to search for a parking spot, and ensure that the parking garage runs smoothly and efficiently. As long as there is a driver who needs parking and an available space, it should take only a couple minutes for the system to fulfill the driver’s need.

Ticket Example

Parking Garage Map (blue dot is flashing light indicating available spot)