Managing reservation and allocation of residential parking spaces

Abstract

Parking plays an important role in urban traffic network and it can influence the final decisions that the commuters choose to travel to work. Nowadays, because of the limitation of parking space, some commuters have to choose public transit to go to work, even they have their own cars. This paper introduces a new idea to find some more parking spots in the Central Business District (CBD) and how to manage as an agent to maximize total revenue. It will release some new parking spaces by repurchasing some parking spots in the residential area. Since their owners will go to work in the daytime and these spots keep vacant during the whole working hours, this will be a kind of wastage in social benefit. At the same time, these parking spots can be utilized effectively to serve the parking demand in CBD and the agency in turn receives revenue. It is thus of interest how to manage reservation and allocation of these residential parking spaces for a given number of private parking spots available in different time slots. In this paper, we introduce a binary integer linear programming problem to maximize the total revenue. The solution will be an optimal allocation for each commuters to park to certain parking spaces. Based on the numerical example, there will be an optimal number of information for agent to collect to receive the maximum revenue when the amount of parking spots is fixed. And there will be a rough optimal ratio between the amount of parking spots and requests to get the nearly maximum revenue under different cases.