This is the fifth in a six-part series which will showcase the projects built by the Top 6 teams of the #SmartCities Hackathon. The Smart Cities hack was a two event hackathon organized by Hackmakers dedicated to finding innovative solutions to generate more awareness, stronger communications and quicker responses for tomorrow’s smart cities.
Team Parkwhere Zachary Chua, Aaron Yu, Lim Xuan Yu | The team has come up with a smart solution called Parkwhere to provide convenient parking facilities to the citizens at just a click of a button. The team ranked #2 among all the participants in the hackathon. |
Challenge Addressed
Smart Administration
Citizens’ are increasingly expecting higher quality services and responses to their needs; be it smarter governance, intelligent mobility or an overall safer city to live. The Smart Administration Challenge category can cover solutions that help cities manage public administration issues.
Problem Statement
In most scenarios, on an average trip to town, a driver would spend 25 minutes looking for a car parking lot, especially during the peak hours
More than 185,700 motorists face the issue of congested car parks and inconsistent parking information on a daily basis
87% of the motorists would try another car park if they had an alternative to their current ones
All this leaves the commuters with more than 4 million minutes wasted daily just looking for a car park
Solution
Parkwhere is an interactive mobile app with
Intuitive UI that informs users of car park availability, rates and location
It also conducts analysis of peak hours at the parkings
Comes with a knowledge sharing mechanism and consensus algorithm to update information based on user experience
How does the Application Work?
When first opening the app, type in the location where you want to go
The app will show us the nearest and available car parks, along with the details such as how many lots does it have, what is the current occupancy at the moment and what are the peak timings of that car park
To see better alternatives, switch over to other car park locations which will be shown in the app and check the details of those.
The details and analytics would be given in brief so that it is easy and convenient for the user to go through and make an informed decision
If the given alternatives are not favorable, you can provide your most favorable location using the app’s consensus algorithm
Solution Architecture
As seen in the diagram below:
The cloud technology is heavily leveraged upon in the application
Firstly the app gathers the real time data about car parks in various regions via the gantries in car parks all over the region.
In case a car park does not have a gantry, an IoT device can be placed instead of the gantry which would eventually perform the same function
Once the app has car park information, it can combine it with rates and location information and send it forward to the user
If any of the dimension are not favorable for the user, the user are always free to provide their feedback (eg. changing the location)
Once the information of feedback is received, the outdated information is updated based on the number of feedback it gets
This is the Wikipedia Model of Knowledge Sharing
Tools Used
Python | Golang | React Native |
JavaScript | TypeScript | Oracle Cloud Infrastructure |
Business Impact
‘A green and efficient transport solution for all’ is the motive of Parkwhere. These are the few ways it aims to achieve it:
Save hours of parking for motorists in busy areas
Businesses in the area can expect to receive more traffic, as users of the app will to find a car park space more quickly
Lesser carbon emission from idle vehicles in and outside the congested car parks and on the streets
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Don’t forget to check out our Previous Winner Showcase Blogs for the Smart Cities Hackathon 2021:
Team GTPLUS & WYHIL – 3rd Position in Smart Cities Hackathon 2021
Team Sheldonopolis – 4th Position in Smart Cities Hackathon 2021
Team Dream Green – 5th Position in Smart Cities Hackathon 2021
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