Vacancy management for a large parking lot to allow autonomous selection of a parking space based on inter-vehicle topology and group presence

As commercial facilities become ever larger in recent years, parking lots, which are built alongside these facilities, are also growing in size. If the parking lot is congested, drivers often spend a long time looking for vacant parking spaces because they cannot see the entire lot, resulting in an ineffective stay of vehicles in the lot. This paper proposes a distributed vacancy management method using inter-vehicle communication. Specifically, the area of a parking lot is divided into sections and all the vehicles within a section form a group consisting of one parent vehicle and child vehicles. Vacancy is managed using this parent-child relations and group presence information. A model for evaluating staying time of vehicles in the lot has been defined, and the effectiveness of the proposed method has been evaluated using simulation.