Dynamic Pricing Communication

Parking is an old concept, which fundamentally involves leaving a vehicle at a place. Parking has been considered as a subsidiary activity to owning a car. However, these days, owning a car has become the norm, which leads to a greater demand for parking. Unregulated parking demand often leads to increased traffic congestion, when there are not enough parking spaces to keep up with the demand. Congestion itself has a negative impact on the environment and causes safety issues in the traffic. Congestion affects the environment negatively by vehicles are unnecessary left running. A common solution to reduce congestion have been by managing the demand for parking spaces through parking prices. During recent years, the existing pricing strategies have not been able to keep up with the daily changes in demand. Therefore, stakeholders in the parking industry have started to shift towards working for dynamic pricing.

Dynamic pricing utilizes a pricing strategy that sets the price according to the current demand and occupancy. However, the parking industry is missing a key feature to fully enable dynamic pricing. There is no communication standard in the parking industry, thus there are no efficient communication means for the stakeholders to share their parking related information (such as: location, occupancy, and tariff data). This thesis has developed and proposes a protocol for sharing such parking related information. The aim is that the protocol will be used as a communication standard in the parking industry. Due lack of time, the most focus was put on completing the protocol for tariff data. However, the developed protocol can be considered as a partial solution towards dynamic pricing. Because, the protocol can still be used to properly share tariff data.

Based on the evaluation, the protocol could express a variety of tariffs. The tariffs that are expressible have use cases such as: early bird, residential, or on-street parking. To make integration easier, for the parking industry, the protocol includes tools to aid integrations of the protocol. A future work will be to complete the support of location and occupancy related data. Additionally, it has been discussed that the protocol will onwards be develop as open-source.

Keywords: Data sharing, Dynamic pricing, Parking industry, Parking tariffs, Protocol