Improving Parking Garage Efficiency using Reservation Optimization Techniques

This thesis describes and evaluates techniques that can be implemented by parking garages to augment parking garage efficiency. The issues studied in this thesis were (i) Real-time tracking of car position (ii) maximizing the number of reservations made for the parking garage by re-arrangement of existing reservations (Reservation Defragmentation) and (iii) maximizing revenue for the parking garage through increased occupancy (Revenue Management).;For the tracking problem, in order to be able to track the real-time position of the vehicle inside the parking garage, we have proposed two techniques. We simulated various conditions of sensor failure rate and determined our metric to be number of tracked points as a percentage of the path to the destination. For the reservation defragmentation problem, we looked at increasing occupancy efficiency for (i) Next day reservations and (ii) Current day reservations. For increased revenue management, we suggested the application of two techniques: Booking limits and Overbooking.;We obtained the following results for the algorithms implemented. In case of the tracking algorithm, as the sensor failure rate increased, the inaccuracy of the two proposed algorithms also increased. For 2% failure rate, we track 0.4% of the incoming cars inaccurately (given that a tracking is marked as correct if 75% or less of all sensors along the path of the car fail). In case of reservation defragmentation, we obtained best results for Recursive First-Fit algorithm. For next day reservation defragmentation, using a mean of 15% cancellation of reservations resulted in 14.6% decrease in occupied parking spots. For current day reservations, we were able to increase maximum occupancy of the parking garage by 5.5% using Recursive First Fit algorithm.;For Booking Limits, we evaluated Poisson arrival distribution and Binomial distribution. We evaluated overbooking for several combinations of No-show rates, mean and standard deviation values and the highest amount of overbooking we obtained was 1.93 times maximum garage capacity and this implies that permitting this number of reservations for the parking garage would minimize the number of parking spots being under-utilized and increase the revenue of the parking garage operator due to effective use of parking spots.