**Smart Car Parking System using IR Sensor**
Muhamad Muzhafar Abd Kadir1, Mohd Nizam Osman2\*, Nor Arzami Othman3, Khairul Anwar Sedek4
1,2,3,4 Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Teknologi Mara, Perlis Branch, 02600 Arau, Perlis, Malaysia
Corresponding author: \*mohdnizam@uitm.edu.my
Received Date: \*date
Accepted Date: \*date
ABSTRACT
*The Smart Car Parking System using IR sensor is a parking management system that is developed to display the vacant or available parking slot. This system integrates a sensor which is called Infrared (IR) sensor with an LCD screen. The sensor is used to detect the absence or presence of a car when it enters the parking slot. The LCD screen is then used to display the vacant parking slot to the driver. The system is developed using the Internet of Things (IoT) technology with the minimum cost, effective and efficient. The purpose of the Smart Car Parking system is to help or assist drivers in finding a vacant parking slot. Furthermore, this system can also record the status of a parking slot and the exact time a car enters or exits a parking slot in the database for the use of the administrative management. Thus, this system will also help the drivers in reducing their time spent in finding vacant parking slots. As such, the drivers save their energy and will help reduce the traffic congestion in the parking area. The development of the Smart Car Parking system is using the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) by implementing the waterfall model as the methodology. A user acceptance test (UAT) based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was conducted with 30 respondents from age 18 – 40 years old to determine the effectiveness of the system. The result obtained from the testing was positively accepted by most of the participants. Therefore, the proposed system has been proven to be beneficial to the drivers and can also motivate other developers to contribute to more future projects to help the drivers in finding a vacant parking slot easily.*
*Keywords: Smart Car Parking, IR Sensor, IoT, SDLC*
# INTRODUCTION
In big cities where the numbers of cars have increased, finding a parking space has been a very challenging task for most drivers, which have resulted in a number of practical conflicts. As mentioned by Srikanth et al., (2009), parking problems are becoming pervasive and ever growing in at an alarming pace in every city. There have been a lot of research and development being conducted all over the world to implement a better parking management system. One of the methods suggested to overcome this issue is using the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. “IoT plays a vital role in connecting the surrounding environmental things to the network and made easy to access those uninternet things from any remote location” (Rao, 2017). With the existence of this technology, it is possible to turn anything. According to H. et at., (2015), Internet of Things has come up as a new technology that is used to indicate a modern wireless telecommunication network as well as an intelligent node interconnected in a dynamic global infrastructure network. Furthermore, IoT is also being understood as the implementation of a connectivity concept of anything from anywhere at any given time.
As stated above, there are many types of the smart parking systems that have been developed using the Internet of Things technology. For example, the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). According to Larisis et al., (2013) “WSNs technology has a wide spectrum of applications, which are deeply embedded into the everyday world up to vehicle detection." Infrared (IR) sensor is also a part of the WSNs technology and it is commonly used in developing a smart parking system. IR sensor is used to detect obstacles by emitting infrared radiation. It is also known as the general-purpose proximity sensor. According to Choudhri et al., (2015), IR sensor can sense or measure the heat and the motion of an object. Hence, IR sensor is the perfect sensor to detect the movement or the motion of a vehicle when it is occupying the parking space.
The selection of this system is to highlight the potential solution which can help to improve the process of finding a vacant parking space. IoT technology is one of the popular elements to use when it comes to the parking management system. As we all know, the difficulty to find a vacant parking space is on the rise and if the IoT technology is adapted to the parking management system, it is expected to ease and help the citizen, especially for whom finding an available parking space is their daily routine in life. With the existence of this technology, it is possible to improve their quality of life. Developing an IoT Smart Car Parking System using an IR sensor will indicate to the drivers the available parking space in the parking slot fast, easy and efficiently. This is because there will be IR sensor to detect whether there is a vehicle or not in the parking slot and LCD Screen in front of the parking zone to display the available parking slot to the driver. Hence, the driver can save their time, vehicle fuel and energy in finding a vacant parking space and also will bring positivity to their daily life because they do not have to face frustration when it comes to finding a vacant parking space.
In this paper, we have developed an IoT based for Smart Car Parking system using IR sensor. This system has been developed in order to make the process of finding a vacant parking space becomes easier, faster and cost effective. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In section 2, the previous study is presented with the related works on IR Sensor. Section 3 presents the methodology which covers the architecture of the proposed system and model used to develop the system. Section 4 discusses the result from the experiments conducted. We conclude the paper in section 5.
**Previous Studies**
This section is an overview several of related works on implementation of IR sensor technologies in various systems and approaches conducted by the researchers.
**Using IR Sensor for a Smart Home and Smart Security**
This system is proposed to develop or introduce smart home system using IR sensor technology, which will detect the presence of persons whenever they enter into a particular zone to control the room’s lights. The IR sensor will send this information to the controller. In this system, the IR sensor and relay are connected with the network. After the controller received the information, it sends out the signal to particular relay, and the appliance will be turned on or off. The system has four IR sensors that being connected to a microcontroller (Chowdary et al., 2015).
There is a similar system that focuses on the smart home system which was developed by Mitra, Mishra, Daniel and Balaji. Same as the previous system, this system uses IR sensor in detecting the human movement in a confined space and focuses more light in that direction. There are two IR sensors to detect whether people are entering or leaving a room. This system also uses an LED indicator to show the IR sensor detecting any movement (Mitra et al., 2019).
Another system also uses IR sensor technology, but this system is implemented towards the security of a house. The IR sensor will be used in detect a movement of person and being placed at the entrance of a house. The Arduino Uno board is connected to this sensors and camera module. Then the Arduino Uno board are being connected to NodeMCU board. When the sensor detects any movement, the camera module will be turned on and will capture the picture of the person in front of the entrance of a house. These capture images will then be stored in the folder of house owner’s PC and it will send captured images to the user email. The results also can be seen in a smart phone (Kousalya et al., 2018).
**Using IR Sensor for Traffic Management**
IR sensor technology also has been used not only for smart home, smart security and car parking system but also has been used on the traffic management system. It utilizes an IR sensor for this project to detect the obstruction when a vehicle passes through. The IR sensor will receive this signal when the car is crowded on the road and when there is a long obstruction. The roads that have more traffic will have more time to get pass the traffic light while the roads that have less traffic experience less time. These IR sensors are used to ensure incoming vehicles meet the signal on the side of the road. The signal will show the Raspberry-Pi processor installed within the signal. The Raspberry-Pi then commands the traffic control to display the relevant signal based on traffic density (Rani et al., 2017).
Another part of traffic management, IR sensor is also used in the traffic monitoring system. Nowadays, problems like traffic jam are really becoming a big issue. The system is designed for traffic jam detection, and the idea is to count the direction of the car wisely. A display screen on each main road will warn the car owner about traffic jams. In each signal and main road, the system will use two IR sensors. The counter rises when the vehicle is detected with the first detector. The counter is added to the "vehicle count" and the previous counter decreases when the second sensor senses the vehicles. If the first sensor detects any vehicles and the second sensor senses no vehicle for a certain duration, it takes the conclusion that a traffic jam has been occurred. The IR sensor being connected to the 8051 family microcontroller (Deekshitha et al., 2017).
**Using IR Sensor for Garbage Monitor**
This system is to develop or introduce garbage monitoring system using IR sensor technology. This system is trying to implement a system whereby the objective is to avoid the dustbin to overflow, thus causing various diseases. The system architecture is divided into various parts, which is LCD, LED, Buzzer, IR sensors, Arduino Uno, Power Supply and Wi-Fi module. The garbage will be put inside the dustbin, and its level will be detected by the IR sensor. The LED will light up at different levels, indicating the amount of trash bin filled up by garbage. The LCD will display the capacity of the trash bin filled up by garbage. When the trash bin is filled up to 80% of its capacity, the buzzer will start ringing. A message, indicating that the trash bin is almost filled up, will be sent to the desired device using the Wi-Fi module which is NodeMCU (Agarwal et al., 2017).
Just like the above system, there is a similar system that focuses on the garbage monitoring system which was developed by Bhor, Morajkar, Gurav and Pandya. Same as the previous system, this system focuses on detecting the level of the garbage. In this system, four IR sensors are used to show the various levels of the waste collected in the bucket. The output will be given to microcontroller to send the message to the control room via GSM module (Morajkar et al., 2015).
**Methodology**
**Developing the System Architecture for Smart Car Parking System**
Figure 1 shows the system architecture for the Smart Car Parking system using IR sensor. The system consists of IR sensor, NodeMCU, LCD display and a web server to store database.
Figure 1: Smart Car Parking System Architecture
Smart Car Parking system is a parking management system using IoT technology. The system will involve the user who is driving his/her vehicle into the parking lot. First, when the user enters an available parking space, the IR sensor detected the presence of his/her vehicle. The IR sensor and LCD display are connected to NodeMCU. After the IR sensor has detected the presence of the vehicle, the LCD screen will display only the available vacant parking space. The parking space that is occupied with a vehicle will not be displayed in the LCD screen. The process in this system also involved the database to store the availability of parking space.
NodeMCU is connected to the Internet by using an access point. This is important to ensure that the NodeMCU can send data when the IR sensor detecting the presence or absence of a car in a parking slot. The data that will be sent to the database will involve the availability status of a parking slot and time when a car enters and exits the parking slot. The data can be viewed by the administration of the parking zone.
**Model Used for the Development of Smart Car Parking System**
The System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) based on the waterfall model (Bassil, 2012) was used to develop the Smart Car Parking System using IR sensor. It consists of five phases such as requirement analysis, design, implementation, evaluation and maintenance.
***Requirement Analysis.*** This is the beginning phase prior to the starting point in developing the system. In this phase, all the research information was collected based on articles from journals, proceeding and websites. This phase is used to identify the problem statement, defining objectives, define significance and define scope and limitation of the project. Moreover, this phase is used to collect data by studying the related work about car parking system and IR sensor technology. Furthermore, the activities included were the identification of hardware and software requirement. This project focuses on searching information about IR sensor, NodeMCU, LCD display and other methods that are related to the car parking system management system and IR sensor technology.
***Design.*** In this phase, the researcher designed the requirement needed in the system development. Besides, the technical issue that may arise towards the development of Smart Car Parking System and the ways to solve the problem was identified and discovered. It implicates several tools and techniques for a solution, which included the system components for hardware and software, system architecture, database conceptual scheme and flowchart.
***Implementation.*** This phase discusses the activities to be setup by the requirement hardware use for this system. There are many types of hardware used to develop the Smart Car Parking System such as IR sensor, NodeMCU, LCD display, jumper wire cables, breadboard and micro USB. Moreover, there are three types of software used for this project, which are Arduino IDE, Notepad++ and XAMPP. In this development phase, the first objective is to design and develop a car parking system using the IR sensor technology to detect the vehicle. The process involved designing the car parking system with IR sensor. This IR sensor is used to detect vehicle when it enters a vacant parking space. Besides, this project also used the LCD display screen to display the vacancy of a parking slot. All data collected will be stored in the database. The coding used in the Smart Car Parking system is executed with PHP language. The aim of the system is to ensure that the structured information application given is able to function and operate well. Therefore, the prototype of car parking environment was designed and integrated with the Smart Car Parking system in a small scale to be tested to the users. Figure 2 shows the prototype of the Smart Car Parking System using IR sensor.
Figure 2: Prototype of Smart Car Parking System
***Evaluation.*** In this phase, the functionality of the system was tested to ensure that there is no problem with the system. Therefore, the system must free from any error that may occur in the language error, logic error and hardware configuration failure. The Smart Car Parking system was evaluated to determine the performance and to ensure all requirements accomplished. The User Acceptance Test (UAT) based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Venkatesh & Bala, 2008) was conducted by using a set of questionnaires to the respective respondents. This testing was performed to make sure it can handle the required task according to specifications and to determine whether the system satisfies the acceptance criteria from the users. The respondents were randomly selected from drivers who have experiences in any car parking system environment. Meanwhile, for data collection was used a quantitative research approach by analyze a survey questionnaire to the respondents using arithmetic mean technique.
***Maintenance*.** After evaluation phase, minor refinement was done to integrate corrections of bugs and the user’s feedback to ensure that the fix does not introduce other problems. The process was focused mainly on fine-tuning of system, configuring, installing, and usability issues. It must meet the scope of any future enhancement, future functionality, and any other added functionality features to cope with the latest needs.
**Results and Analysis**
To evaluate the user acceptance test for Smart Car Parking System using IR sensor, the study was tested to thirty (30) respondents from the range of 18 – 40 years old. The targeted participants were the citizen, especially who is driving a vehicle. The experiment was conducted by given a demonstration on how the system works to the respondents. Then, they were required to answer a set of questionnaires, which consist of twelve (12) questions and divided into four components, which included Perceived Ease of Use (PEU), Perceived Usefulness (PU), Attitude (ATT) and Intention to Use (BI). The data were analyzed using arithmetic mean technique based on the ranking score value. The participants required to rate the answer with the scale of 1 to 5, which was strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree and strongly agree.
Then, overall mean was calculated and classified into three categories, which is negative, neutral and positive based on the range of mean value in between zeros to five as shown in Table 1. This table will be used to identify the level of user's acceptance toward the proposed system.
Table 1: Range of Mean Value
| **Category** | **Range of Mean** |
| ------------ | ----------------- |
| Negative | 0.00 – 1.66 |
| Neutral | 1.67 – 3.33 |
| Positive | 3.34 – 5.00 |
Meanwhile, Figure 3 summarizes the results for the identified criteria and total mean for each component respectively. The results showed that the targeted respondents were satisfied and positively accepted all functionalities and features provided by the Smart Car Parking System using IR sensor. This can be indicated by the total mean result for the Perceived Ease of Use (PEU) received 4.40 and Perceived Usefulness (PU) received 4.30 respectively. On the other side, most of the participants wanted to use the Smart Car Parking System using IR sensor because the system is able to display an available vacant parking space to the driver and can save their time when they want to find a parking based on the total mean results obtained 4.40 for Attitude (ATT) and 4.40 for Intention to Use (BI). Besides, the overall total mean for the UAT was 4.34, which means positive feedback from the participants. Based on the result obtained, it was proven that the Smart Car Parking System using IR sensor was a good idea and a great system to develop, and it indicates that the respondents were positively accepted the proposed system.
\[CHART\]
Figure 3: Total Mean Score for Each Component for UAT
**Conclusion**
This paper presents an efficient solution for finding a parking using parking management system concept. Internet of Things (IoT) was the main concept used to develop the Smart Car Parking System using IR sensor. The outcome from this system is useful to be implemented at any parking zone areas to help driver finding a vacant parking easily. The Smart Car Parking System using IR sensor was a prototype that was developed to assist the drivers in finding a vacant or available parking slot. There is LCD screen that will display the availability status of parking slot. Furthermore, in order to get a parking slot easily, a system that can assist drivers in finding an available parking slot can be very helpful as it gives conveniences to the drivers as it can save their time, energy and fuel consumption. This prototype system was developed for people, especially who is driving a car. This system was developed to detect the presence and absence of a car in order to know the availability status of a parking slot.
In order to perform the task, the system was integrated with the IR sensor which is a sensor that can measure movement with nearly the same reliability in the absence or presence of light. The IR sensor will be connected to the NodeMCU board and other devices such as LCD Screen and being programmed using software called Arduino IDE. Moreover, the system was also measured using a user acceptance test which is based on the technology acceptance model. This test was performed to see the acceptance of people towards the system. The test was participated by 30 respondents. Most of the respondents found that it was a great idea to develop a system that can assist drivers in finding a vacant parking slot.
In conclusion, Smart Car Parking System using IR sensor was able to perform its function such as detect the presence or absence of a car, display the availability status of parking slot and store the data of IR sensor into the database. Furthermore, this could be the beneficial motivation for other developers to contribute more into this type of project and also help to improve the finding of a vacant parking slot.
**References**
Agarwal, P., Sharma, S., Gupta, L., & Manideep, B. (2017). Smart Electronic Garbage Management System- Based IOT. *International Journal of Soft Computing and Engineering (IJSCE)*, *7*(1), 93–96.Bassil, Y. (2012). A Simulation Model for the Waterfall Software Development Life Cycle. *International Journal of Engineering and Technology*, *Vol. 2*(No. 5)Chowdary, U. V., Rohith, K., Sandeep, P., & Ramu, M. (2015). Home Automation System Using IR Sensors. *International Journal of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IJEEe)*, *4*(6), 11-19.Deekshitha, Disha, D., Malavika, & Soumya. (2017). Traffic Monitoring System Using IR Sensors. *International Journal of Advance Research, Ideas and Innovations in Technology*, *3*(3), 1045–1057.H., Z., A., H., & M., M. (2015). Internet of Things (IoT): Definitions, Challenges and Recent Research Directions. *International Journal of Computer Applications*, *128*(1), 37–47. Kousalya, S., Priya, G. R., Vasanthi, R., & Venkatesh, B. (2018). IOT Based Smart Security and Smart Home Automation. *International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT)*, *7*(04), 43–46.Larisis, N., Perlepes, L., Stamoulis, G., & Kikiras, P. (2013). Intelligent Parking Management System Based on Wireless Sensor Network Technology. *Sensors and Transducers Journal*, *18*(Special Issues), 100–112.Mitra, S., Mishra, P., Daniel, J. A., & Balaji, S. (2019). Smart Light for Home with Automatic Direction and Intensity Adjustment using Arduino. *International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering (IJRTE)*, *8*(1S4), 479–484.Morajkar, P., Bhor, V., Pandya, D., Deshpande, A., & Gurav, M. (2015). Smart Garbage Management System. *International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT)*, *4*(03), 1117–1120Rani, L. P. J., Kumar, M. K., Naresh, K. S., & Vignesh, S. (2017). Dynamic Traffic Management System using Infrared (IR) and Internet of Things (IoT). *Third International Conference on Science Technology Engineering Management (ICONSTEM) 2017*, 353–357Rao, Y. R. (2017). Automatic Smart Parking System using Internet of Things (IOT). *International Journal of Engineering Technology Science and Research*, *4*(5), 225–228.Srikanth, S. V., Pramod, P. J., Dileep, K. P., Tapas, S., Patil, M. U., & Sarat, C. B. N. (2009). Design and Implementation of a Prototype Smart PARKing (SPARK) System Using Wireless Sensor Networks. *International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops 2009*, 401–406V. Reve, S., & Choudhri, S. (2012). Management of Car Parking System Using Wireless Sensor Network. *International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering*, *2*(7), 262–268.Venkatesh, V., & Bala, H. (2008). Technology Acceptance Model 3 and a Research Agenda on Interventions. *Decision Sciences*, *39*, 273–315.