1.1 Introduction
Parking management system is an automatic system which delivers data processing in very high speed in systematic manner. Parking is a growing need of the time. Development of this system is very useful in this area of field. Parking management system for managing the records of the incoming and outgoing vehicles in an parking house. It's an easy for Admin to retrieve the data if the vehicle has been visited through number he can get that data. Now days in many public places such as malls, multiplex system, hospitals, offices, market areas there is a crucial problem of vehicle parking. The vehicle parking area has many lanes/slots for car parking. So to park a vehicle one has to look for all the lanes. Moreover this involves a lot of manual labour and investment. Instead of vehicle caught in towing the vehicle can park on safe and security with low cost.
As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.
1.2 Background of Study
A computerized car parking system is a mechanical system designed to minimize the area and/or volume required for parking cars. Like a multi-story parking garage, an APS provides parking for cars on multiple levels stacked vertically to maximize the number of parking spaces while minimizing land usage. The CPS, however, utilizes a mechanical system to transport cars to and from parking spaces (rather than the driver) in order to eliminate much of the space wasted in a multi-story parking garage (Patrascu, 2010).
In this parking management system, a database lists the plate numbers of users and records the duration of their use of the parking lot. An Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system is also implemented to recognize the plate numbers of the users as they enter the parking lot (Ayer et al.; Sulaiman et al., 2013). Though this limits the use of the parking lot, it increases the security of the lot which has been deemed as a reasonable trade-off.
The challenges encountered that led to the execution of the research work is that, the traffic issues due to illegal parking in the vicinity. Parking Management System offers a solution to both - the parking lot owner and the vehicle owner as it facilitates hassle free vehicles parking and reduces parking management costs. Parking control system has been generated in such a way that it is filled with many secure devices such as, parking control gates, toll gates, time and attendance machine, car counting system etc. These features are hereby very necessary nowadays to secure cars and also to evaluate the fee structure for every vehicles entry and exit.
1.3 Statement of Problem
Investigation revealed that the problems of the existing Parking Management System which are stated as follows;
- Traffic issues due to illegal parking in the vicinity.
- Poor maintain listing of cars within the parking lot.
- The manual system cannot track the entry and exit of cars.
- Inaccurate estimation of cost of per vehicle according to their time consumption.
1.4 Aim and Objectives of the Study
The aim of the study is to design and implement a Computerized Parking Management System. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows to develop an application software that will:
- Determine the cost of per vehicle according to their time consumption;
- Track the entry and exit of cars;
- Determine if the parking lot is full or not;
- Maintain a listing of cars within the parking lot; and
- Enables the time management and control of vehicles using number plate recognition.
1.5 Significance of Study
The proposed parking management solution will significantly offer benefit to both the user and the parking lot owner as it helps in reducing traffic by enhancing user experience. This system supports various parking applications that can easily handle and organize the data of vehicles. To rectify the complications of parking security, our parking management system allows recognizing and validating the automobiles at both entry and exiting points.
This study will be of immense benefit to other researchers who intend to know more on this study and can also be used by non-researchers to build more on their research work. This study contributes to knowledge and could serve as a guide for other study.
1.6 Scope of Study
The scope of the research is focused on the Design and Implementation of a Computerized Parking Management System.
1.7 Limitations of the Study
During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:
- Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
- Establishment Policies: Establishment policies posed a serious limitation as most staffs are not ready to release information needed for this project work. There were lots of information needed from the staffs of this institution to enhance the study which took them time to release or they did not release at all for security purposes, hence the scope was reduced.
- Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
- Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
- Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet).
1.8 Definition of Terms
Registration: This is a one-off process of collecting a detailed data about a vehicle and its owner for identification.
Vehicle data: This is unique information collected from a specific vehicle.
Vehicle Identification number: It is a unique strings of numeral used for identifying all the vehicles. It is used by the department of transport of any university institution as a means of identifying cabs, tricycles and buses. It is a numeric password shared between the vehicle owners and a system that can be used to authenticate the user to the system.
Software: These are program for computer which allows certain specific task to be accomplished e.g. word process etc.
