Solving car parking headaches

7 July 2010

Handy Santono and his supervisor Dr Kuang Ye Chow with a poster presentation of the winning project

How many times have you circled a shopping centre car park on a Saturday afternoon trying to find that one elusive empty spot?

It was this common frustration amongst shoppers that has led Handy Santono, a final-year student from the School of Engineering at the Monash University Sunway Campus, to develop an intelligent parking system to alert drivers to the nearest available parking spot.

In Handy's parking solution, a red light-emitting diode (LED) light is used to indicate that a parking spot is occupied, while a green light enables the driver to recognise a space is available.

The system is not dissimilar to existing systems available in several major shopping centres around the world; however, Handy's system has a key point of difference.

"Having one LED indicator per lot is not energy-efficient, so for my project, I used one LED light for four car park spots. Only when all four parking spots are used, the light turns red and this saves the power ratio four to one. Furthermore, it is easier to spot whether the light is red or green from a distance," Handy said.

Santono's system has all the features of the conventional systems, but is cheaper to build and maintain than existing systems, and is more energy-efficient.

The project has gained interest from Sunway Integrated Facilities Management under the Sunway Group, which is currently testing the system at Menara Sunway - a Kuala Kumpur office building.

Santono's project supervisor Dr Kuang Ye Chow said the project would lay the foundation of an overall improvement of parking systems.

"This initiative between Monash University Sunway Campus and the Sunway Group is to develop a home-grown advanced facility management technology. We are looking to develop this further to include face recognition, automatic number plate registration, and monitoring suspicious behaviour in parking lots." Dr Kuang said.

Handy's innovative project was awarded the first prize in the School of Engineering's final-year project on 22 June in the Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering category.