Car parking management systems provide “presence detection for cars”, and act as electronic valets to guide customers from the carpark entrance to an available parking space.

Systems provide advanced real-time monitoring of parking bays, visually highlight the status of bays, direct drivers to free bays and provide carpark operators with comprehensive data to optimize traffic flow and the utilization of space.

Through optimal routing of cars to spaces, parking management systems reduce fuel consumption and pollution (as cars no longer need to circulate to search for spaces) and reduce the energy required to filter and extract polluted air – a double environmental benefit. Parking management also enhances the customer experience by avoiding the stress and wasted time involved in searching for spaces.

Smarte’s parking management systems can integrate fully with the lighting / CO management scheme and communicate across a shared network buswire. The integrated system maximises parking efficiency and lighting efficiency by linking lighting levels to car park occupation and, where applicable, daylight.

The system can integrate with access devices such as card-entry or personalised fobs such that activation of the device energises lighting from the entry point to an allocated parking bay and from that bay to the pedestrian exit points: all other lights can remain off or at low level.

The parking management system comprises four elements.

Parking Bay Sensors

Parking bay sensors enable drivers to look down an aisle of parked cars and instantly identify vacant spaces. The intelligent sensors comprise ultrasonic detectors with integral high-brightness indicator LEDs which illuminate green when a space is vacant. The sensors also relay information in real time to electronic signage and message boards which direct drivers to vacant spaces.

Parking management modules
Tests and measures the performance of an emergency lamp and relays data along the Dali bus for logging and analysis on the graphical software.

Electronic display boards
Electronic display boards, message panels and plasma screens indicate the real-time availability of parking spaces on a level-by-level or zonal basis to guide drivers speedily and efficiently to vacant spaces.

Head end graphical software
Graphical software indicates the status of each bay, provides the facility to count vehicles in and out, identifies ‘over parked’ cars for billing and security reasons, enables traffic flows to be analysed and controlled, and allows reporting on key performance indicators including bay utilisation, bay turnover etc. Management and monitoring can be carried out from a head-end PC within the parking facility or via the internet/intranet at a remote monitoring point.