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A Smart Android Based Parking System to Reduce the Traffic Congestion of

Dhaka City

Conference Paper · February 2019

DOI: 10.23919/ICACT.2019.8701935

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Nawsheen Tarannum Promy Sadman Islam

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 A Smart Android Based Parking System to Reduce
the Traffic Congestion of Dhaka City
Nawsheen Promy, Sadman Islam
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Military Institute of Science and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh
nawsheenpromy@gmail.com, sadmanarko3921@gmail.com

Abstract— Traffic congestion is a common phenomenon in building. So, we need to come up with a digital plan to solve
developing countries like Bangladesh. This is the quotidian the parking problem in this metropolitan city.
scenario in most of the metropolitan cities of the world. After observing all the parking problems of Dhaka, this
Because of heavy traffic, people lose their valuable time from
their busy schedule. One of the prime reasons of this traffic proposes a smart android parking control system which will
congestion is parking on the roadside. So, a need arises to help you to find out the nearest parking area or any parking
develop a parking system so that it can reduce the traffic slot which is being empty as the owner of that parking may
congestion in near future. The paper focuses on a smart have taken his/her car somewhere else. If a car owner finds a
android based parking control application which will help parking slot in anyone’s parking area, when he/she will enter
you to find out a parking area in nearby your location. The
mobile application will also help you to pay the parking charge into that parking area, the timer will start by the parking lot
by online payment system. A counter will be there in the owner. When the car owner wants to leave the parking slot,
application which will help you to count the amount of time he/she will call the parking owner to stop the counter. When
your car have spent in the parking lot. This application will the counter will stop, it will automatically generate a parking
also track the entire process and all the previous records. bill for the car owner. Now, there will be 2 ways to pay the
Keywords—Traffic Congestion, Parking Area, MAC address, bill to the parking lot owner. If the car owner wants to pay
Attendance System, Smart Android Based Mobile Parking the bill in cash, he/she will directly pay this to the customer
Control Application, Location, Track. or if he/she wants to pay the bill any mobile banking system
like bKash or DBBL rocket. Once the bill is paid, the parking
I. Introduction slot owner will give a confirmation that the bill is paid. In
Dhaka city is one of the most crowded and busiest cities that application, there will be calling system to both parking
in the world. Almost 20 million people live in this city [1]. slot owner and car owner. They can also rate each other as
The total number of registered vehicles in Bangladesh is per their behavior.
approximately 3.1 million [2]. Thousands of people daily move The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The literature
from one place to another for doing their respective work. But work of our work is presented in Section II. In Section III, we
due to inefficient traffic management system, lack of strategic discuss the need findings, the conceptual architecture of the
planning poor traffic infrastructure facilities, it always takes proposed system. The development of the system is given
more time to go from one place to another [3]. Because of in Section IV. The result of the evaluation of our system is
this unbearable and seemingly incorrigible traffic inside the demonstrated in Section V. The discussion, implications, an
city, people miss their important work, or cant even reach idea for future work are presented in Section VI. Finally, the
their respective destination in due time. conclusion the paper in Section VII.
One of the major reasons for this traffic jam is parking
beside the roads. Unnecessary parking on the roads make II. Literature Review
the roads narrow and thus create traffic congestion. In a This research is focused to achieve a smart parking control
metropolitan city like Dhaka, if drivers park cars in the busy and management system for Dhaka city in an Android plat-
roads, the roads become scanty. It will take more time to cross form. This will alleviate our contemporary problems, leading
the roads. This scenario is seen in front of school buildings or towards a better lifestyle. To find out the related literature,
offices. A huge number of cars are being parked in the nearby we have conducted searches in the major scholarly databases
roads and create this unbearable traffic in Dhaka city. including ACM scholar, Google Scholar, IEEE explorer, Re-
Again, it can’t be denied that there are not enough parking searchgate and ScienceDirect using suitable search strings.
slots as per the number of vehicles in this metropolitan area A parking-lot management system was proposed by Parki,
as people haven’t followed the urban rules in the past times. Thakur Chauhan where the user can book parking-lots
The high-rise buildings aren’t built according to the building with the help of RFID [4]. The payment could be done by
code. Instead of making parking in the basement or parking, crosschecking the check-in and out time. But the system
many building owners decided to make it another floor to allowed to pay after checking out from the lot, then later
give rent for extra profit. paying the fines for further checking-in, which clearly didnt
Now, it is not possible to make the ground floor into help the scarcity of parking necessity hence anyone could take
a parking area. This will destroy the infrastructure of the advantage of the system.
 Another GSM based parking system was discussed by 5) Many parking slots owner take their cars in the very early
Sahu, Gulhane Shelokar, where the system was divided into morning with them at work and there parking slots has
3 modules [5]. The system interacted with the user with been left unused whereas at the same time some car
SMS-based authentication in each step, which enhanced the owners are looking for a parking area but can’t find one
security but brings complexity in every step. in that same location so he/she needs to park his/her
A cloud-based car parking system was introduced by car on roadside.
Zhanlin, Ivan, Droma and their co-authors [6]. But the We have talked with our respected traffic police officers and
cloud-based parking system included a lot of software like also the owners of the parking slots and drivers. They all have
Kafta/storm/HBase clusters, OSGi web applications in addi- agreed that there should have a system that can bring the
tion NoSQL. The entire propose was very complex and not parking slot owners and car owners under one roof to reduce
user-friendly as people were looking for easy solutions all the the traffic control by providing the parking slot to the car
time. owners in the absence of their own car.
Bilodeau, Victor P [7] came up with a different technology
which is called IPT (Intelligent Parking Technology). They
B. Developing the conceptual design
had focused on the problem that drivers usually faced regard-
ing parking ticket issues. But this technology was also based In this sub-section, the conceptual design of the system is
on different sensors and GPS technology. So, this research given below which is the representation of the system.This
also relied on hardware and the complexity of the hardware will help you to understand it clearly. The block diagram of
was not warmly welcomed by the general people because if the system is given in Figure 1
the hardware disturbs the entire system will collapse.
III. Design of the Proposed Architecture
In this section, the system design is discussed. To discus
the system architecture, we have worked on two processes
1. Finding the necessity of this system, 2. Developing the
conceptual design.

A. Finding the Necessity

Our proposed system can supersede the tradition parking
system of any country. We have found some primary issues
that led us to establish the system. To aggregate the need
findings we have visited different offices, shopping malls, and
some police stations. We have talked with different office
staffs, shop owners, to ask them about the parking system
of their buildings. We tried to collect the information about
their current parking slots. Then we have talked with the
traffic police officers about the current traffic system and
how they have been working to minimize the illegal parking
in our country. We have also talked with the parking slot Fig. 1: Block Diagram of The Proposed System
owners and asked them if they would be comfortable to use
their parking slots in the absence of their cars. Then, finally, User authentication is one of the prime factors of our
we have talked with the drivers who are mainly responsible proposed system. To make sure the user is authentic, we
for the illegal parking and asked them the necessity of this will use their mobile numbers to register. As, we all know in
type of application to reduce the traffic congestion. Based Bangladesh, all the mobile numbers are being verified by the
on their answers many inconveniences caused by the existing National ID. So, once the owners install the APK files of the
parking system has been found which we have stated below. system to their Android phones,they need to register himself
1) In traditional parking system, it takes a lot of time to with their phone numbers. After giving phone number, a 6
find a parking slot. So, it is kind of time-consuming. digit code will be given to an user for further process. The
2) Generally, traditional parking system requires hardware user needs to add the other information like his/her name,
equipment, which makes the entire system complex. Email Address, Car Number, Parking Slot Number. An user
3) If the hardware system disturbs, the entire traditional can register himself as a car owner, a parking slot owner or
parking system collapses for that day until the hardware both.
problem resolves. At that time, the whole organizations
maintain the parking system by writing the details of a Once, you have registered as a parking slot owner,
car in a paper. you need to press the button empty whenever you want
4) There is no rules found in the tradition parking system, to give rent to your parking slot. Now, if you are a car
if the car is being parked in the area for 1hr or for the owner, after completing the registration you need to search
whole day. by location. When you will search if any parking slot is
found empty, it will notify you. The application will also B. User Interface
show the nearest parking location from your current location. The layouts of the UI design are taken care of by Extensible
Markup Language (XML) which is a markup language that
If the parking slot is available, you will call the parking exemplifies a set of rules for encoding documents in a format
slot owner and ask him/her if you can park your car there. that is both machine and human-readable. We have used the
After the car is being parked, a timer will start to count the Android platform to develop the whole development system in
amount of time the car is spent in the parking lot. When the Android Studio. We have also used Java for the development
car owner wants to release the parking slot, he/she will take purpose which is the official language of Android development
away the car and the timer will be stopped. After the timer and is well supported by Android Studio. The UI design of
is being stopped, an automatic report will generate about our mobile application is given in Figure 3.
the rent of the car owner. Then the car owner can pay the
bill to the parking slot owner and leave the parking area.

The flowchart of the system is given in Figure 2.This will

give you a clear vision how the entire system will work.

Fig. 3: UI of the Mobile Application

Fig. 2: Flow Chart of The Proposed Architecture

At the end of the entire process, the status column will

C. Database
show every detail of the owners. In the application, the owners
can also give ratings to both the owners. Both owners have We have used MySQL database, the most widely used open
access to complain. For example, if any damage is done to the source server to store both the car and the parking lot owners
car during the parking time, the car owner can simply take the information and the timing of arrival and departure of the car.
photo and other necessary evidence against the parking lot After registration of the owners into the system, they will be
owner. The application authority will take necessary actions uniquely identified by their email address and mobile number.
against the owner. If any of the owners behave rudely, they In the MySQL server, there will be several rows where they
can also complain about that. can put the information like their name, email address, mobile
number, address, etc.
IV. Development of the Proposed System
In this section, we have discussed how we have developed D. Server
our proposed system.
PHP is the server-side scripting language that we used to
A. Components connect the MySQL database server to Android Studio.
The mobile application is basically an Android based ap-
plication. So, it basically required a mobile device which E. Android Based Mobile Application
supports Android operating system. To develop the entire Android-based built-in security features like Android Appli-
process, we need a heavy duty laptop which will supports cation Sandbox (which isolates the app data and code execu-
Android studio desktop application to write the code. tion from other apps), application framework (Cryptography
and permissions) are used so that it can significantly minimize is something new. Basically, during the working hour the
the frequency and impact of application security issues. The parking lot owner of the residential area leaves their parking
development of the app is designed in such a way with the lot in rent. As, the driver knows after dropping the student
default system and file permissions so that it can take difficult the car needs to get parked. So, he tries to find a parking
decisions about security such as User-granted permissions to which is near the school so that he can come before the
restrain access to system features and user data. school breaks.
For better understanding the whole technical process is From the above experimental results, it is assured that this
depicted in Figure 4 system has the following benefits-
• Accuracy: This system can accurately calculate the rent
of the parking charge of any car.
• Time Consuming: This system reduces the time of
finding suitable parking lot. Because the application will
give you the chance to find the nearest parking location.
• Reducing the traffic congestion: As the drivers park the
car in the parking lot, they don’t need to park the car in
the road. So, the roads are properly used by the vehicles.
So, it minimizes the traffic congestion.
Thus the system has advantages which make it separate
from the existing attendance taking method. The difference
between this method and the existing method are given in
Table I.
TABLE I: Difference between the existing system and the
proposed system
Existing Systems Our Proposed System
1. This parking system is soft-
1. Most of the existing parking
ware based. It is just a mobile
Fig. 4: Block Diagram of the Technical Part of the System systems are hardware based.
application.
2. The existing parking system
2. Our system is a software based
is usually placed in front of the
system. So, it doesn’t require
parking area. A guard will give a
any hardware set up in front of
V. Evaluation token to every car and allow the
the door or any token.
car get inside the parking area.
After developing the system, we have done an evaluation 3. In our proposed system there
will be a counter inside the ap-
for measuring the accuracy and correctness of the system.We 3. The existing parking system
plication. It will act like a stop
have also measured the rate how much it is better than the has a fixed car parking rate.
watch in the parking slots owner
There is no difference if a car is
traditional ones. parked for 1 hour or 8 hours
application. So, it will help to
generate the exact parking bill
for each of the car.
To evaluate the process, we have taken two steps. At first, 4. In existing systems, there is no
4. In our proposed system will
we have gone to different shopping malls parking lot to check opportunity to utilize someones
give the personal parking slot
how the traditional system works. We have seen their is very personal parking area when they
owners an opportunity to utilize
aren’t utilized their parking area.
big queue in front of the parking lot. The guard is giving their parking in the absence of
The existing all systems are for
their cars and make some profits.
tickets to each of the drivers. Then he gives a pass to each the large parking areas.
driver. When the drivers are leaving the parking areas, they
are paying the guards, but there is no checking of the arrival
and the departure time. Then we have also visited some VI. Future Extension
official areas and some schools. There we have seen that The parking system is currently developed for the android
drivers are waiting for the students in front of the school platform but we are focusing to expand it on iOS platform
gate and made a huge traffic congestion. as well in the upcoming days. Besides, we will try to make
After surveying this areas, we have selected some areas and the parking system more space optimized [8] and efficient.
trained some drivers how to operate the mobile application Again, in this android based parking system the payment
and also have been to some parking owners house and asked method is relied on cash or any mobile banking system. In
them if they want to rent their parking when their own future, we will try to build our own mobile banking system
car isn’t there. Some of them willingly participated in our inside the application so that people don’t need to depend
campaign where others don’t find the process trustworthy. on other mobile banking system or cash.
After observing several days, we have seen we have found a
revolutionary result. We have been to an school area which is
located near a residential area. Before our mobile application VII. Conclusion
is being operated, there used to be huge congestion due to The proposed smart android based parking system has
traffic. But suddenly the local people have found that there been developed using the existing technology. This system
automates the process of parking system, thus saves a lot
of time . It is also a cost-effective system because it relies
only on a smart-phone. As this completely automates the
parking system, it leaves no room for any kind of error. This
system will provide a safety and hassle free parking to the
car owners as the parking slot owners are being registered
with details. Unused parking slots in working hours will add
some extra money to parking slot owners. Thus, it will help
both the parking slot owners and car owners. Our system
will solve the excruciating traffic problem and make our life
better and more productive.

References
[1] W. U. P. Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, “Dhaka population,”
Oct. 20 2017, [Online; accessed 9-June-2018]. [Online]. Available:
http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/dhaka-population/
[2] B. R. T. Authority, “Number of registered mo-
tor vehicles in bangladesh (yearwise),” 2017, [On-
line; accessed 15-September-2017]. [Online]. Avail-
able: http://www.brta.gov.bd/newsite/en/whole-bangladesh-up-
to-sep-2016/
[3] A. Quium and S. Hoque, “The completeness and vulnerability of
road network in bangladesh,” Engineering Concerns of Flood, pp.
59–75, 2002.
[4] C. S. Parkhi P, Thakur S, “Rfid-based parking management sys-
tem.” International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and
Communication Engineering, 2014.
[5] V. G. Sahu, V. Gulhane, and N. Shelokar, “A web based centralized
vehicle parking system using gsm security,” IJAIEM, vol. 2, no. 4,
2013.
[6] Z. Ji, I. Ganchev, M. O’Droma, L. Zhao, and X. Zhang, “A cloud-
based car parking middleware for iot-based smart cities: Design and
implementation,” Sensors, vol. 14, no. 12, pp. 22 372–22 393, 2014.
[7] V. P. Bilodeau, “Intelligent parking technology adoption,” Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Southern Queensland, 2010.
[8] Y. Zhao and E. G. Collins Jr, “Robust automatic parallel parking in
tight spaces via fuzzy logic,” Robotics and Autonomous Systems,
vol. 51, no. 2-3, pp. 111–127, 2005.

Nawsheen Promy was born in 1996. She has

completed her B. Sc from Department of Com-
puter Science and Engineering from Military In-
stitute of Science and Technology of Bangladesh
in 2018. She has passed her Higher School Cer-
tificate exam from Holy Cross College School
Secondary Certificate exam from Shaheed An-
war Girls School College. Nawsheen was also a
member of IEEE. Her current research work is
mainly on wireless communications, networking
and website developing.

Sadman Islam was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh

in 1996. At present he is pursuing his B.Sc.
degree in Computer Science and Engineering
from Military Institute of Science and Technol-
ogy at Dhaka, Bangladesh. He passed his School
Secondary Certificate exam from Motijheel Ideal
School College and Higher School Secondary
Certificate exam from Dhaka City College. He
will receive her B.Sc. degree from CSE in January
2019.

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