Smart Park: Campus Smart Parking System Notes

Project Overview and System Background

Smart Park is a campus smart parking system prototype developed by Syed Raffid and the group Friends4Life. The system is designed to help students, university staff, visitors, and administrators find and navigate to parking areas using a mobile application supported by real-time data and network services. Its primary goal is to reduce the stress, fuel waste, and traffic congestion typically associated with high-demand periods like class changes and examination periods.

Identified HCI Problems in Current Parking

The project identifies several Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) challenges in the existing campus parking experience. These include unclear availability, where users lack real-time updates on parking zones; weak contact support, where systems fail to adapt to a user's location or destination; and high attention demand, which creates distractions for drivers. The system's design focus is to move toward a model that supports calm, simple, and confident decision-making.

Ubiquitous Computing (UC) Architecture Layers

The Smart Park architecture is organized into four distinct layers. The human layer consists of the various user groups with specific parking needs. The device layer includes the mobile application and admin dashboards. The network layer provides connectivity through Wi-Fi, mobile data, and API services. Finally, the physical world layer encompasses the campus roads, parking zones, and walking routes.

System Requirements and Design Principles

To function effectively as a ubiquitous computing system, Smart Park adheres to five core requirements: context awareness, mobility, transparency, attention management, and calmness. The prototype emphasizes transparency by showing the status and "freshness" of data, while attention management is handled by providing calm, nonintrusive notifications that are only delivered when they are actionable for the driver.

Prototype Evaluation and Improvements

The aquarium SEI evaluation (also mentioned as iQuery evaluation) identified weaknesses in transparency and cognitive load in the initial design. The improved prototype addresses these by providing a dashboard summary, a color-coded live map, and direct recommendations for the nearest suitable parking based on user location. For administrators, the system provides monitoring tools to track usage trends and manage congestion more efficiently.

Questions & Discussion

The presentation concluded with a walk-through of the prototype interface. During the demonstration, the presenter shown the end-to-end flow from user login to parking confirmation. It was noted that while the system displays parking availability, it operates as a service-based prototype and does not yet implement individual bay-by-bay sensor detection. The session highlighted that the project is HCI-driven rather than purely feature-driven, focusing on reducing the cognitive load of users navigating the campus environment.