An automated payment system for car parks based on Near Field Communication technology

In this paper we describe an automatic system for car parks payment based on Near Field Communication technology. This system has been projected and developed as part of the SIESTA project, a research project financed by the Tuscany region in Italy, to study innovative services for tourists visiting cities of art. The developed system allows users to use their own mobile phone both as an electronic ticket to enter and exit the parking and as an electronic wallet to pay automatically for it. To fully implement this system, four applicative protocols have been developed: two protocols manage the entrance and the exit operations for close parks, while the other two manage the interaction of the user with the kiosk, enabling respectively the load of the money on the phone and the cash payment. The underlying structure of the system foresees the presence of the corresponding softwares performing the protocol operations and interacting directly with the NFC memory of the phone for the read/write tasks, and of a database collecting all the information concerning the presence and the payment of the users.