Redefining Parking with Smart Car Parks

With an approximate 30% of time spent searching for parking lots, parking in urban environments is a universal bugbear for motorists all over the world. Besides the time wasted, circling for parking contributes to traffic congestion and carbon emissions. At the same time, car park operators grapple with increasing operational and maintenance costs, limited visibility on parking occupancy, and inefficient fee collection methods arising from conventional car park management systems.

Technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data analytics, video analytics, automation and cloud, can help tackle these issues, modernise car park operations and improve environmental sustainability for the benefit of motorists, operators and communities.

ST Engineering’s Smart Car Park Platform innovation is a ticketless and barrier-free system that is built on a secure, cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) platform. Paired with a mobile app, it unifies car park operations on a single, robust platform to provide convenient and seamless parking for motorists, while providing real-time visibility and analytics of car park operations to enhance operational efficiencies for car park operators. 

The Smart Car Park can be deployed at all car park premises. Features of the Smart Car Park include:

• Barrier-Free, Ticketless System

Unlike conventional car parks, the Smart Car Park does not require physical barriers at the car park entry/exit points or physical payment/ticketing systems. Through Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology, vehicle licence plate details can automatically be detected and captured upon entry, and as the vehicle travels through the car park. The vehicle information is recorded on the Visitor Management System which is linked to a Smart Car Park Management Platform.

This allows parking fees to be automatically calculated and billed to the motorist via a mobile app, minimising service-related issues and revenue loss due to equipment downtime, while enabling smooth vehicle entry and exit through the car park and an improved customer experience.

• Mobile Application

For greater motoring convenience, parking services can be delivered digitally, 24/7 through a mobile app.

For instance, GoParkin, an in-house developed mobile app by ST Engineering, is a one-stop parking platform that integrates parking services, information and digital payment applications for motorists. The app provides real-time car park occupancy information and directional navigation to the closest parking available via user-friendly maps, allowing motorists to reduce circling and easily find parking. In addition, the app allows parking charges to be automatically billed and paid via a variety of digital payment options and provides convenient access to other parking services such as season parking applications.

• Smart Car Park Management Platform

The Smart Car Park Management Platform centrally manages all car park operations and maintenance regimes. Through data analytics, car park equipment can be monitored to generate insights that facilitate preventive and predictive maintenance. This allows operators to extend the lifecycle of car park equipment and avoid costly downtime.

To help car park operators better plan resource management and optimise operational efficiencies, data analytics aggregates and analyses parking data to generate key insights on occupancy records, car park resource status and parking transactions. This helps to optimise the allocation of parking lots and better matches pricing with demand for optimised revenue collection. The remote monitoring and access to real-time car park status and transactions also allow car park operators to scale their operations accordingly, managing single or multiple car parks at any time with reduced reliance on manpower.

• IoT-as-a-Service

The IoT platform is a modular solution that is designed to integrate with mobile applications and other systems such as Parking Guidance Systems, Electronic Vehicle Charging, enforcement systems and payment modules. A Software-as-a-Service option can help car park operators deploy the solution quickly and cost-effectively without the need for heavy infrastructure and software investments.

ST Engineering’s Smart Car Park Platform is certified as an IoT Market Ready Solution by Intel, a programme that qualifies solutions that are optimised for data-intensive workloads and are adaptable, vetted, and ready for immediate implementation across multiple industries.

Debuting Singapore’s First Barrier-Free Smart Car Park at NTU Singapore

In 2020, ST Engineering debuted Singapore’s first barrier-free Smart Car Park at the Nanyang Technology University Singapore. Thanks to technology, motorists can now enjoy seamless and hassle-free parking, while car park operators can achieve maintenance and operational cost savings, and most of all, gain useful insights to offer new value-added services and future-proof their business models.  

Learn more about our AGIL Smart Car Park Suite.