Objective
The Smart Parking project involves the study and development of multi-agent based cyber-physical systems solutions for smart parking systems, focusing on distributed (and decentralized) negotiation strategies, as well as the deployment of agents in physical platforms.
The validation of the proposed approach considers two case studies related to the intelligent management of parking lots, one in IPB for bykes and another in UTFPR for cars, considering that agents negotiate vacancies of an intelligent parking lot in a decentralized way, aiming to optimize the use of resources.
The Project
The Smart Parking project comprises researchers and students from IPB and UTFPR towards the development of computational solutions for urban traffic problems.
One can find plenty of technological solutions for smart parking. Nonetheless, there are few solutions which aim to use intelligent agents augmented with cyber-physical systems in order to not only offer a parking spot but also seek a way to manage and better organize the parking lot.
With this, we have been developing solutions using multi-agent technologies, like JADE, Jason and JaCaMo, as well as IoT technologies, e.g. MQTT and NodeRed.
Moreover, our project presents different negotiation protocols between agents and also proposes some architectures in order to deal with distinct settings of a smart parking system, like:
- Holonic Agents architecture
- System failure recovery architecture
- Centralized vs decentralized architectures
At last, our Smart Parking approach can be used for parking any sort of vehicle. But, in our deployments, we are using the parking of bicycles at IPB and the parking of cars at UTFPR.
Partners
This project is funded by Instituto Politécnico de Bragança and Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, and technically supported by CeDRI – Research Centre in Digitalization and Intelligent Robotics
Team
UTFPR: Gleifer Alves, André Pinz, Bruno Alves, Pedro Botelho
IPB: Paulo Leitão José Barbosa, Lucas Sakurada, Srison Kadariya
Publications
L. Sakurada, J. Barbosa, P. Leitão, G. Alves, A. B. Pinz, P. Botelho (2019), “Development of Agent-Based CPS for Smart Parking Systems”, to appear in the Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON’19), 14-17 October, Lisbon, Portugal.
L. Sakurada, J. Barbosa, P. Leitão (2019), “Deployment of Industrial Agents in a Smart Parking System”, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN’19), 22-25 July, Helsinki-Espoo, Finland, pp. 1552-1557.
B. Alves, G. Alves, A. B. Pinz, P. Leitão (2019), “Experimentation of Negotiation Protocols for Consensus Problems in Smart Parking Systems”, to appear in the Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems (HoloMAS’19), 26-28 August, Linz, Austria.
Contacts 
IPB: Paulo Leitão (pleitao at ipb dot pt)
UTFPR: Gleifer Alves (gleifer at utfpr dot edu dot br)