Design And Performance Evaluation Of A Parking Management System For Automated, Multi-Story And Robotic Parking Structure

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present design and performance evaluation through simulation of a parking management system (PMS) for a fully automated, multi-story, puzzle-type and robotic parking structure with the overall objective of minimizing customer wait times while maximizing the space utilization. Design/methodology/approach The presentation entails development and integration of a complete suite of path planning, elevator scheduling and resource allocation algorithms. The PMS aims to manage multiple concurrent requests, in real time and in a dynamic context, for storage and retrieval of vehicles loaded onto robotic carts for a fully automated, multi-story and driving-free parking structure. The algorithm suite employs the incremental informed search algorithm D* Lite with domain-specific heuristics and the uninformed search algorithm Uniform Cost Search for path search and planning. An optimization methodology based on nested partitions and Genetic algorithm is adapted for scheduling of a group of elevators. The study considered a typical business day scenario in the center of a metropolis. Findings The simulation study indicates that the proposed design for the PMS is able to serve concurrent storage-retrieval requests representing a wide range of Poisson distributed customer arrival rates in real time while requiring reasonable computing resources under realistic scenarios. The customer waiting times for both storage and retrieval requests are within acceptable bounds, which are set as no more than 5 min, even in the presence of up to 100 concurrent storage and retrieval requests. The design is able to accommodate a variety of customer arrival rates and presence of immobilized vehicles which are assumed to be scattered across the floors of the structure to make it possible for deployment in real-time environments. Originality/value The intelligent system design is novel as the fully automated robotic parking structures are just in the process of being matured from a technology standpoint.