Bosch Develops Community Based Parking System

Driving in Dubai in peak traffic hours is a difficult task. Finding parking during these peak hours, especially in downtown areas is even more difficult. Drivers looking for parking account for about a third of the cars caught up in the congestion. That is all set to change by 2018, with a little help from Bosch. According to a survey conducted by the online portal, Statista, at least 87 per cent of motorists are interested in solutions that would make finding a parking space easier with the task being considered as needlessly time-consuming and stressful.

Bosch is working on an open service platform that would promote community-based parking. The vehicle itself can use the service platform to identify available curbside parking spots and the information can be entered into a digital parking map. This map is provided to all vehicles that are a part of the service, through means like a navigation system so that drivers can steer directly to available parking spaces, thus reducing traffic congestion and minimizing environmental damage. Based on the current timeline, the system will be rolled out for drivers by 2018.

Dr. Dirk Hoheisel, member of the board of management of Robert Bosch GmbH said that by using community-based parking, cars are converted into sensors on the internet of things. This contributes to smarter cities and aligns perfectly with the Smart Dubai initiative. Currently, almost one-third of new vehicles have a park assist function. Bosch intends to use the ultrasonic sensors in these assistants and programs to detect curbside parking spaces. Thus, cars will be able to identify parking spaces as they drive past even at speeds as high as 50 kph and above. In order to filter bus stops, driveways and no-parking zones from the data, Bosch uses data mining methods. Once a minimum number of users is reached, Bosch can even determine the length and width of a parking space and thus search for spaces that might fit a particular model. Bosch collaborated on a study with the Technical University of Munich and found that provided a little more than one percent of all the cars on the road are a part of the service, it is possible to get this kind of data.

This information is then sent to the respective vehicle manufactures through a communication interface like Bosch’s connectivity control unit (CCU), and then forwarded in anonymous form to the Bosch IoT Cloud (BIC). The data from all the vehicles is then pooled to generate a digital parking map derived from a standard street map, and is then transmitted to the vehicle manufacturers, who in turn can share it with all of their vehicles that are connected to the server. The more the number of vehicles that participate in community-based parking, the more accurate the service will be. Bosch expects that by 2020, all newly registered vehicles in markets such as Europe or North America will be connected in this way.

In order to allow multiple manufacturers to participate in the service at the service, it has been deliberately set up as an open service platform.