Smart parking meter system

• US 6,791,473 B2
• Filed: 12/02/2002
• Issued: 09/14/2004
• Est. Priority Date: 11/30/2001
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute
• Original Assignee: Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute
• Inventors: Kibria, Sami, Wu, Joseph Chai-Wan, Kavanagh, Christopher Troy, Thiessen, Nicholas Christopher Wade, Card, Paul Serge, Rueda, Jose Alejandro
• Primary Examiner(s): GOINS, DAVETTA WOODS
• Application Number:
  US10/307,513
• Publication Number:
  US 20030179107A1
• Time in Patent Office: 652 Days
• Field of Search: 340/932.2, 340/904, 340/933, 340/988, 340/870.02, 340/309.16, 340/539.13, 235/382, 235/381, 235/384, 705/13, 705/418, 705/21
• 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 module of each of the parking meter elements and the control module of the communication unit including communications protocols by which each of the parking meter elements and the communications unit communicate to each other via a wireless medium;

some of the parking meter elements being identified together in a group thereof such that the group and the transportable communication unit form a network;

wherein the control module of each of the parking meter elements of the group have the communication protocol thereof arranged such that each parking meter element of the group is able to communicate over a wireless medium with each other parking meter element of the group and with the transportable communication unit.

8. The apparatus according to claim 1 wherein the control modules of the parking meter elements are arranged such that, 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, moaning that an object occupying the parking space and the next 7 bits represent 127 minutes.

2. 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 module of each of the parking meter elements and the control module of the communication unit including a communications protocol by which each of the parking meter elements and the communications unit communicate to each other via a wireless medium;

some of the parking meter elements being identified together in a group thereof such that the group and the transportable communication unit form a network;

wherein the control module of each of the parking meter elements of the group have the communication protocol thereof arranged such that each parking meter element of the group is able to communicate over a wireless medium with each other parking meter element of the group and with the transportable communication unit;

wherein the group covers a greater geographical area than a range of communication of the wireless medium and wherein each parking meter element has the control module thereof arranged to communicate with next adjacent ones of the other parking meter elements of the group and arranged such that each parking meter element generates a table containing the statue of all of the parking meter elements of the group whereby each parking meter element can communicate to the transportable communication unit the status of all.

3. The apparatus according to claim 2 wherein the control module of the transportable communication unit is arranged to act as a master for the communication protocol such that the master will initiate contact with the parking meters and the parking meter elements act as masters and slaves between one another.

4. The apparatus according to claim 2 wherein each parking meter element contains a table of entries, where each entry is the status of a parking meter element on its block.

5. The apparatus according to claim 2 wherein each parking meter element has its own group id so parking meter elements in another group will not communicate to other parking meter elements not in their group.

6. The apparatus according to claim 4 wherein the size of the status table is a dynamically created table such that, as more parking parking meter elements are discovered or removed in the group with the same group id, the status table of each parking meter element is passed to each other parking meter element, and the status table may increase and decrease in size.

7. The apparatus according to claim 2 wherein the control modules of the parking meter elements and the transportable communication unit are arranged such that a messaging system deployed within the parking meter elements is designed to be event driven, such that, once the state of a given parking meter element 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 elements to be contacted by a given parking meter element.

9. The apparatus according to claim 2 wherein the control modules of the parking meter elements and of the transportable communication unit are arranged such that a priority thread is used for incoming connection events in which there are two types of incoming priority connection events, the connection event of parking meter elements is lower than that of the transportable communication unit, so that when the transportable communication unit makes a connection to any parking meter element, that connection would become the highest priority event.

10. The apparatus according to claim 9 wherein the control modules of the parking meter elements and of the transportable communication unit are arranged such that the internal task queue priority thread handles multiple race condition situations since communication is not an atomic function and since other ones of the parking meter elements and the transportable communication unit could establish connections with the parking meter element 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 parking meter element in the current tasks list.

11. The apparatus according to claim 10 wherein the control modules of the parking meter elements and of the transportable communication unit are arranged such that 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.

12. The apparatus according to claim 11 wherein the control modules of the parking meter elements and of the transportable communication unit are arranged such that them 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.

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

some of the parking meter elements being identified together in a group thereof such that the group and the transportable communication unit form a network;

wherein the control module of each of the parking meter elements of the group have the communication protocol thereof arranged such that each parking meter element of the group is able to communicate over a wireless medium with each other parking meter element of the group and with the transportable communication unit;

wherein the control modules of the parking meter elements and of the transportable communication unit are arranged such that the communication protocol uses event driven communication so that the parking meter elements of the group and the transportable communication unit are only attempting to open connections at appropriate times in order to reduce or eliminate paging collisions where the network is in a constant listening state, and a single master controls the entire network so that the master has a list of every parking meter element in the group and it has information about which parking meter elements can be contacted by other parking meter elements to make a connected loop back to itself and where, if the meters are not configured in a loop, then it is able to detect and correct that.

14. The apparatus according to claim 13 wherein, the control modules of the parking meter elements are arranged such that in the group all parking meter elements are in a listening state, the master of the group has a routing information list and passes this ordered list to the next address along with the states of all the parking meter elements and the meter parking meter element then looks up the address of the parking meter element 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 meter elements, the master sends out multiple synchronize tokens.

15. The apparatus according to claim 14 wherein the control modules of the parking meter elements are arranged such that the communication protocol uses Hops in the message token so that, once a parking meter element has received the message token, it goes through the list and increments the hop counts of the other parking meter elements 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 transportable communication unit receives a synchronize event it adjusts the times remaining on the parking meter elements by the arbitrary number.