Smart parking meter system

• US 20030179107A1
• Filed: 12/02/2002
• Published: 09/25/2003
• Est. Priority Date: 11/30/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute
• Original Assignee: Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute
• Inventors: Card, Pau Serge, Rueda, Jose Alejandro, Kibria, Sami, Wu, Joseph Chai-Wan, Kavanagh, Christopher Troy, Thiessen, Nicholas Christopher Wade
• Granted Patent: US 6,791,473 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 340/932.2
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0284 Time or distance, e.g. usage of parking meters or taximeters
• CPC Class Codes: G08G 1/14 indicating individual free spaces in parking areas

Abstract

A Smart Parking Meter System makes it possible to track whether or not a vehicle occupies parking meter stalls and whether or not the time has expired. The system uses a wireless communication protocol which may be of the type known under the trade mark “Bluetooth” and provides the portability of embedded systems and the convenience of personal digital assistants with the powers of the C and Java programming languages. There are two main components to the Smart Parking Meter System, the handheld device, or the PDA, and the actual parking meters. Each device has the Smart Parking Meter System application installed in it, as well as the wireless modules, such as Bluetooth to use as a communication medium. The parking meters also have a motion sensor to detect any movement within it view range. The handheld device is able to extract all the parking states for each parking meter within a block or street depending on user configuration of system.

Claims

1. An apparatus for use in controlling parking comprising:

a plurality of parking meter elements each for mounting on a support adjacent a parking location, each parking meter element including;

a payment receptacle operable by a person parking a vehicle for receiving a payment from the person;

a display for displaying an allowable time of parking;

a sensor for detecting the presence of a vehicle in the associated parking location;

a control module responsive to the payment receptacle and the sensor and arranged to control the display;

at least one transportable communication unit for transportation by and manual operation by an attendant including a control module for communicating with the parking meter elements;

the control modules of each of the parking meter elements and the communication unit including communications protocols by which the parking meter element and the communications unit communicate to each other via a wireless medium.

2. The apparatus according to claim 1 wherein the communication protocol is arranged such that each parking meter element is able to communicate with each other parking meter element of an identified group of such elements.

3. The apparatus according to claim 2 wherein the group covers a greater area than the range of communication and wherein each parking meter element communicate with next adjacent ones of the other parking meter elements of the group of such elements and each parking meter element generates a table containing the status of all of the parking meter elements of the group whereby each parking meter element can communicate to the transportable unit the status of all.

4. The apparatus according to claim 1 wherein the sensor is a motion sensor for the parking meter to detect an object in its view range.

5. The apparatus according to claim 1 wherein a programmable setting is required to define the period of free parking.

6. The apparatus according to claim 3 wherein the handheld device acts as a master for the system, meaning that the handheld device will initiate contact with the parking meters and the parking meters act as masters and slaves within their own network, where a handheld device will always act as a master.

7. The apparatus according to claim 3 wherein each meter contains a table of entries, where each entry is the status of a meter on its block.

8. The apparatus according to claim 3 wherein each meter has its own block id so meters on another block will not communicate to other meters not on their block.

9. The apparatus according to claim 7 wherein the size of the parking meter status table is a dynamically created table such that, as more parking meters are discovered or removed on the block with the same block id, the status table of each meter is passed to each other meter, and the status table may increase and decrease in size.

10. The apparatus according to claim 3 wherein the messaging system deployed within the parking meters is designed to be event driven, such that, once the state of a given parking meter changes it will notify its neighbors of this change and the neighbors will then propagate this change in state to their neighbors;

and the message will be dropped once there are no more parking meter devices to be contacted by a given parking meter.

11. The apparatus according to claim 1 wherein, in order to implement a predetermined maximum time of parking, this amount to time uses a 8 bit representation or one byte, where the first bit is one of two states, 0 meaning no object occupying the parking space, or 1, meaning that an object occupying the parking space and the next 7 bits represent 127 minutes.

12. The apparatus according to claim 3 wherein a priority thread is used for incoming connection events by other devices (that is from other parking meters and handheld devices) in which there are two types of incoming priority connection events, the connection event of parking meters is lower than that of the handheld device, so that when a handheld device makes a connection to any parking meter, that connection would become the highest priority event.

13. The apparatus according to claim 12 wherein the internal task queue priority thread handles multiple race condition situations since communication with the hardware is not an atomic function and since other devices could establish connections with the device to handle this type of condition there is provided a lock abstraction where the job of the task priority threads is to open a connection to the next device in the current tasks list.

14. The apparatus according to claim 13 wherein the internal task queue never actually hangs onto a connection lock, the connection lock is only held by the External Connection Priority Thread so the all other internal priority threads know the hardware is busy.

15. The apparatus according to claim 14 wherein there are two separate applications employing a priority-based system, as well as a thread-based application where the priority-based application has put the task queue priority thread as the highest priority and the connection priority thread as the lowest priority and the thread-based application does not require a priority based system because each individual specialized event will be handled by a separate thread.

16. The apparatus according to claim 1 wherein the entire meter network is formed into groups of meters separated into blocks where these two objects need to provide an efficient mechanism for the searching of parking meter nodes and particular blocks.

17. The apparatus according to claim 1 wherein there is provided a State Manager which is responsible for maintaining the state of each meter downloaded and viewed;

where this includes offering estimations of whether or not a parking meter node should be updated and where this involves examining time stamps from the meter state object.

18. The apparatus according to claim 1 wherein the messaging protocol is a brute force algorithm which attempts to counter the problem of creating connections to other devices by using random lengthened delays and multiple connection attempts to eventually to create a connection to other wireless enabled parking meters.

19. The apparatus according to claim 1 wherein the system uses event driven communication so that devices are only attempting to open connections at appropriate times in order to reduce or eliminate paging collisions using a system similar to the Token ring protocol where the network is in a constant listening state, and a single master (or possibly two masters at opposite ends of the network) controls the entire network so that the master has a list of every parking meter on the current block and it has information about which parking meters can be contacted by other parking meters, although it is not guaranteed to know every communication edge, but it does know enough of them to make a connected system back to itself and where, if the meters are not configured in a loop, then it is able to detect that and take appropriate action.

20. The apparatus according to claim 1 wherein, in a circular configured system, all devices are in a listening state, the master of the block (which is selected by choosing the lowest hardware device address, called the medium access control or MAC layer address) has a routing information list and passes this ordered list to the next address along with the states of all the meters and the meter then looks up the address of the meter after its own entry in the list and passes the list on to it adding its new state to the list and, also to increase the accuracy of the states held in the parking meters, the block master sends out multiple synchronize tokens.

21. The apparatus according to claim 1 wherein another consideration for timing accuracy is the use of Hops in the message token so that, once a device has received the message token, it goes through the list and increments the hop counts of the other meters in the list, and adds/updates its own state supplying a hop count of 0 using an arbitrary number for the time per hop, so when the handheld device receives a synchronize event it adjusts the times remaining on the meters by the arbitrary number.