2019 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things and Intelligence System (IoTaIS)
Smart Parking Area Management System for the
Disabled using IoT and Mobile Application
Rifqi Muhammad Fikri
Dept. of Eco-Friendly Offshore Plant FEED Engineering
Changwon National University
Changwon-si, Gyeongsangnam-do South Korea
rifmff@gmail.com
Abstract—There are a lot of cases of non-disabled drivers
regularly using spaces for people with disability. They often get
away with it too unless an authority happens to check while their
vehicle is parked there. This project presents a reserve-based
parking system in securing the parking spaces for the disabled.
In this proposed system a special parking area for disabled will
be introduced using current technology such as the internet of
things (IoT), and mobile application as a Smart City concept
initiatives. By using the reservation system and alarm system,
violation of disabled parking system can be avoided. In order to
separate normal people and disabled people, we use
identification method by using NFC tag reader. After the
successful identification process, the user can make a
reservation and choose the disabled parking space with their
mobile application. The system also uses an alarm system to
warn the non-disabled person who wants to park in the disabled
parking spot. The implementation of the system, expected to
simplify the operations of parking systems, as well as improve
the quality of life of the disabled person.
Keywords: Internet of Things, Smart City, Reservation-based
Parking Management, Mobile Application, Alarm.
I. INTRODUCTION
In the last couple of decades, urban cities are expanding
due to the growth of population and business activities. In
conjunction with the rise of the population, one of the
challenges of a modern urban environment is to apply the
information and communication technology (ICT) to improve
the population quality of life. Nowadays most of our daily
activities have been helped by various kind of technology. As
time goes on technology has become simpler but still reliable
to use upon. Internet of Things (IoT) technology is a novel
approach of connecting things or objects and thus transmitting
information between various entities of the physical world or
to the control centers where this information can be
interpreted. IoT has been poised as the next evolution of
internet promising to change our lives by involving seamless
access to people and devices in a ubiquitous way leading to a
smart world [1]. Furthermore, by enabling easy access and
interaction with a wide variety of devices, the IoT will foster
the development of a number of applications that make use of
the potentially enormous amount and variety of data generated
by such objects to provide new services to citizens,
companies, and public administrations [2]. The application of
the IoT paradigm to an urban context is of particular interest,
as it responds to the strong push of many national
governments to adopt ICT solutions in the management of
public affairs, thus realizing the so-called Smart City concept
[3].
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Mintae Hwang
Dept. of Information and Communication Engineering
Changwon National University
Changwon-si, Gyeongsangnam-do South Korea
professorhwang@gmail.com
In this context, one of the challenges of a modern urban
environment is to provide the high demand of the population
which is the demand for the parking spaces. For example,
when the area is in rush hour and the traffic is at its peak,
almost all parking spaces are already occupied. Due to the
high demand for parking spaces, some people tend to use the
parking space for a disabled person when the normal parking
spaces are full. There are also cases when the violators park in
the disabled parking spaces just because it's near the entrance,
and they can avoid walking. Not only non-disabled car drivers
that violate but even motorcyclist also take granted of the
spaces to park their motorcycle easily. It becomes a norm to
the community, and if no further action or solution were taken,
the violators will always take the disabled rights. Even though
the current infrastructure provides accessibility to disabled
people, it lacks the ability to manage and distinguish between
authorized users and offenders. Even in some cases, there are
violators who purposely have fake documents displayed on
the windscreen to get the benefit of the disabled rights.
Moreover, for the authorities to monitor the parking spaces are
quite challenging. To detect illegal parkers cannot be
recognized easily, which made this a continuous problem for
the disabled to face every day if there is no solution provided
to them.
This project was developed to make a reservation-based
parking system, focusing to aid the disabled for more
convenient parking and easy access to the building. Since
most of the parking space for the disabled already located near
the entrance or exit of places such as shopping mall, hospitals,
colleges, etc. Therefore, the project will utilize the available
parking spaces with minimum change to the infrastructure. In
this paper, we design and implement the prototype of a Smart
Parking System for Disabled People. Thus, the main function
of the system is parking space reservation based on the real-
time information and securing parking spaces for people with
disability via Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications.
Note that the person with a disability here could be the driver
or the passenger. With a reservation-based system and also
alarm system, the violation of disabled parking slot can be
reduced. Therefore, the disabled can retrieve parking
information and reserve their desired vacant spaces via the
internet conveniently. In order to separate the normal people
and the disabled people, we take advantage of the disabled id
card. By using the identification method like NFC tag reader,
the mobile application will scan the NFC tag on the disabled
id card and then give the user permission to reserve and use
the disabled parking spaces. The unauthorized person that
goes near the disabled parking slot will get warned by the
alarm system so they will not park there and move on. The
proposed system introducing the usage of IoT and mobile
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2019 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things and Intelligence System (IoTaIS)
application techniques, the system aims to improve the quality
of life of the users. In conclusion, the developed prototype
would simulate the situation in protecting the parking spaces
for disabled people.
This paper is organized as follows. In section II, the related
research on the disabled parking system as well as IoT
technologies is introduced. In section III, the detailed
architecture of the proposed system is presented. In section IV,
the implementation of the prototype and challenges that the
system might face in a developing country’s real environment
are described. Finally, section V presents the concluding
remarks.
II. RELATED RESEARCH
Study on Internet of Things states it as a paradigm that is
rapidly gaining ground around in the scenario of modern
communication. The idea is to bring together various things
around us which through unique addressing schemes, will be
able to interact with each other[4]. The main idea of an IoT
system is to create a smarter way of life using computing tasks
instead of everyday mechanical tasks.
Locomotive alarm and parking system [5] discussed how
the system monitors the locomotive using infrared technology.
The main function of the system is to automatically park and
gives an alarm to avoiding accidents between locomotives.
SmartEye was developed using infrared technology to
monitor the parking spaces, and the sensors are put on the road
and then the information about the parking is sent to the
content management, known as SmartRep that collects the
data about parking spaces. The system also comes with an
application for the user to search for empty parking spaces in
the area.
Another study developed the DisAssist System [6]. The
system was developed to assist the disabled in finding their
parking spots, at the real-time condition and also enable
authentication of the users to exactly park at the reserved
spots. DisAssist System role the parking management system
with the usage of M2M technology that eases the findings of
the disabled parking spaces. Furthermore, with the
authentication system that enables the deserved users to park
at their spaces, the system can be monitored by the authority
and further action can be taken to those who violated the rules
and regulations.
A study on design and development of disabled parking
system for the smart city [7] discussed how technology can be
applied to preserve disabled parking rights. Instead of relying
on law enforcement, the system can do monitoring, and give
alarm itself whenever violations have occurred. The research
use computer vision system and RFID tag reader to scan the
OKU Sticker(a term for a person with a disability) and use
alarm technology to warn the violators. Whenever the
violators go into the disabled parking spaces, the alarm will
sound to warn the violators and then there will be a high
possibility that the violators will move on to the other parking
spaces.
Cheap and effective system for parking avoidance of the
car without permission at disabled parking permit (DPP)
spaces [8] discussed about the usage of multiple methods for
detection of car in the DPP space using ultrasound sensors,
near-infrared (NIR) cameras, RFID writer and reader with IC
card, IC chip and IC tag as well as ETC system and GPS
receiver. The system consists of 3 main functions, car
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detection system, distinguish cars that park in DPP spaces
with and without permission, make a caution to the car without
DPP. Moreover, the proposed car detection system will be
effective if more than two systems out of the proposed car
detection systems are used to avoiding car parking without
permission. It is also found that a considerable combination of
more than two methods proposed here would be useful and
effective to avoid the car parking without DPP permission.
A Reservation-based Smart Parking System (RSPS) [9] is
a parking management system that allows drivers to
effectively find and reserve vacant parking spaces. The
management system determines the parking prices, and also
broadcasting real-time parking availability information to
users. By periodically update the parking status from the
sensor networks, the reservation service is affected by the
change of physical parking status. The drivers are allowed to
access this cyber-physical system with their personal mobile
devices The experiment results show that the proposed
reservation-based parking policy has the potential to simplify
the operations of parking systems, as well as reduce traffic
congestion caused by parking searching.
SIMON is a demonstration project aiming to use ICT
services to promote the independent living and societal
participation of mobility-impaired people in the context of on-
street public parking areas and multiple transport modes [10].
Being the application targeted towards the mobility-impaired
end-users, special care has been taken to make the application
accessible to users with different impairments. As requested
by the users of the focus group, the application does not
contain tutorials but instead features a consistent contextual
help screen that can be brought up at any point in time through
the main menu
The proposed system is different from all the compared
research as mentioned earlier. The main function of the system
is to protect the disabled people rights for parking spaces, by
using a reservation-based system with database and mobile
application. We also use low-cost technologies such as NFC
tag reader to authenticate the disabled people and alarm
system with Arduino and sensors to secure the disabled
parking slot from the violators.
III. BASIC ARCHITECTURE OF THE PROPOSED SYSTEM
A. Feature of the system
Before practical implementation of the system, all the
necessary requirements are needed to be considered. Table 1
shows the configuration and the main function for the
requirements of the system.
TABLE I. BASIC FEATURE OF THE SYSTEM
Requirements Details
Warn the non-disabled person
Alarm System that goes to the disabled
parking slot.
Providing the user with an
application for a parking
reservation.
Mobile Application,
NFC Tag Reader Differentiate type of user, if
the user is a disabled person,
the system will do
authentication.
Maintaining database for the
Server
system
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B. Architecture of the system
Research and implementation of various parking systems
are currently present at large, aiming to resolve various social
issues within the communities. The architecture of this system
holds similarity in features and performance with any other
system, but lightweight technology and cost-effectiveness will
make it feasible for many countries. Therefore, the
architecture of this system can be shown as fig.1
Fig 1. Basic architecture of the parking system.
With this system, we aim to provide a user-friendly
platform that can verify the disabled people, and allows the
disabled people to find available parking spaces. As the
architecture is presented in the Fig.1, the system contains
communication between the device, server, and the hardware
system. The database on the server is present to manages both
the user information data as well as parking spaces data. A
mobile phone-based application is used to connect to the
server by using the internet. The process starts whenever the
user login to the application, and then make a reservation for
a parking slot with the mobile application. There are two types
of client, normal people, and disabled people. In Fig.1 we can
see how each client interacts with the system. If the user is
disabled people, authentication method will be required. Upon
successful authentication and login, the user will be able to
choose the available parking slot only for disabled people.
After choosing the parking slot, the user can park at the
designated location. Furthermore, the mobile application will
send a request to the server to update the available parking slot
database and send a request to turn off the alarm system so the
user can park conveniently. On the contrary, if normal users
want to occupy the disabled parking slots, they will be warned
by the alarm system. Finally, when the user is going to leave
the parking area, the mobile application will update the
available parking slot and then the alarm system will be turned
back on.
In conclusion, the system will take the advantages of the
existing communication infrastructure to exchange data
between various components of the system. Therefore, M2M
communication serves a crucial role in order to receive the
data from the various sensors and transmitting it to the server.
The transmission of the data will be transmitted through the
existing cellular network in mobile devices.
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IV. IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PROPOSED SYSTEM
As the system mainly has two main features namely,
parking reservation and user verification, cellular network
like LTE will be used to serve the M2M communication.
When the data from a user application or any station sent to
the webserver, the data is analyzed and then the web server
will approve or disapproved the data. Accordingly, the
database running in the server side is also updated by the data
from the user application. In the mobile application, the user
has the ability to interact with the system to reserve the
desired parking slot. The only mandatory action is the
disabled user verification as it enables the system to approve
the appropriate usage of the disabled parking slot. Upon the
departure of the parking area user have to end the reservation
in order to update the available parking slot database, and also
turn back on the alarm system. Then, the parking slot is ready
to be used by the next users. The basic configuration of the
proposed system is shown in Fig. 2 below
Fig 2. Basic configuration of the parking system.
The whole proposed system mainly consists of 3 sub-
system sections, namely, server, mobile application, and
hardware system. Each of these sections is developed with a
different setup. A detailed explanation of the system is given
below.
A. Server System
Databases of the system will be maintained in the server
along with a periodic backup system. A web server like
XAMPP(Cross-Platform, Apache, MariaDB, PHP, and Perl)
will be used to maintain the system databases. There are two
main databases in this system, user information database, and
parking slot database. When the user registers to the
application, the data of the user will be uploaded to the user
information database. Afterward, when the user wants to
make a reservation, the user has to login to the application,
and the application will check if the user information is
already registered in the database. After successful login user
can choose the parking slot, and then the application will send
the chosen parking slot number to the parking slot database
to update the database. Last, when the user is leaving the
parking area, the user has to end the reservation with the app.
Next, the app will send a request to update the database,
removing the user in the parking slot database. Therefore, the
server must be able to maintain the information at a real-time.
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2019 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things and Intelligence System (IoTaIS)

B. Mobile Application System

The application for this system is developed in Android
Studio integrated development environment. The flowchart
of the mobile application system can be shown as Fig. 3.

Fig 5. Illustration of the normal member user interface.

Then in the parking space interface, the chosen parking

slot will be marked, so nobody besides the user can take the
parking slot. Last, when the user is leaving the parking area,
the user has to end the reservation. By ending the reservation,
the parking slot database will be updated, and so does the
available parking space interface.

C. Hardware System
Fig 3. Flowchart of the mobile application system. The hardware system consists of an Arduino connected to
various ultra-sonic sensors along with, wifi shield, and
First, when users want to make a reservation, they have to
buzzers as the alarm. This hardware system will be installed
login to the application. If the user is disabled people, the user
in every disabled parking slot. Thus, the purpose of the
has to prove their identification by reading the NFC tag in
hardware system is to protect the disabled parking slot by
which containing a user identification code or just simply
warning the non-legitimate users. If the non-disabled users
input their disabled user id number. The application will do
park their car in the disabled parking slot, the ultrasonic
validation of the user identification code, and if the user is
sensor will detect an object, so the buzzer will make a sound
valid, then the application will show the available parking
to warn the non-disabled user. The visualization of the cases
space interface. Furthermore, the user can choose the desired
of the normal member is shown in the Fig.6.
parking slot and after choosing the parking slot, the parking
slot database will be updated. The illustration of the user
interface can be shown as Fig.4 and 5.

Fig 6. Visualization of the alarm system for normal member cases.

However, when the disabled user reserved the vacant

Fig 4. Illustration of the blue-badge member user interface. disabled parking slot, the mobile application will send a
request to the Arduino to turn off the ultrasonic sensor, so he
or she can park in the desired parking slot conveniently. The

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2019 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things and Intelligence System (IoTaIS)
visualization of the cases of the disabled member is shown in
the Fig.7.
Fig 7. Visualization of the alarm system for disabled member cases.
V. ISSUES AND CHALLENGES
As the system is implemented, there are always issues and
challenges outside of the system. These issues and challenges
could improve the current system in the future. Some of the
issues and challenges of the proposed system are:
1) Location of the Parking areas
This system target is for outdoor parking because in
outdoor parking we can easily install the hardware system,
and maintain the process of getting the real-time information
of the parking spaces by using mobile phones to send and
receive the data from the database. In basement parking,
getting a reliable cell signal in these spaces is typically
problematic because a basement is below ground level.
Obviously, there’s no clear line-of-sight to the cell tower
signal source your phone is trying to connect with, so that can
reduce the reliability of the real-time information. Installing
a signal booster or amplifier to the system could be a solution
for these issues.
2) Social awareness
Whenever there's a new technology in regards to
regulation or facilities in society, people need to learn and
understand how to operate the newest technology. A standard
operating procedure needs to introduced to society in order to
explain the newest technology. Another problem is, since this
system purpose is to make a privilege parking area for the
disabled people, some people may don’t like the idea of
giving someone a privilege to get what normal people cannot
get. A social awareness needs to be increased in the society
to solve this kind of issue.
3) Data security
Sometimes, a person may try to exploit the system to gain
their own benefit. If an attacker has good knowledge of the
system, the attacker can mess the system, use the system for
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their benefit or stole the personal data of the user. Data
security in developing countries are low, the system needs to
develop a data encryption program to prevent the threat from
the intruders.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we design and implement a prototype of the
Smart Parking Area Management System for Disabled
People as a conceptual guideline of how technology can be
applied to preserve disabled rights, specifically regarding
parking rights. In this system, we implement a parking
reservation policy in order to secure the parking space for the
disabled. The proposed system is an example of how mobile
application and IoT technologies can be applied to Smart City
concept, and have a positive impact on society and quality of
life, especially for the disabled people. In future work, we
will devise different policies to encourage users to adhere to
the rules of the system increasing its reliability and
functionality especially in terms of user verification and
reservation enforcement.
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