Automated Parking System
The automated parking system allows a user to pay at street parking meters without the usage of coins. It will also notify the user with a telephone call before the parking time limit expires. There are two types of users for this program, customers and administrators. Customers use the system to park their cars at street parking meters without the effort of putting coins in the meters. Customers will each receive radio frequency tags to access the parking meters. The tag must be placed on the front window of a car to fulfill its purpose. The tag is detected by a radio frequency reader of a parking meter when a car with the RF tag parks at the meter. When the tag is detected by the reader device, the central server of the system automatically charges the customers account. The system is designed to charge the customers for their parking for each minute of use. Customers must first register online to use the system. After the online registration is completed, the customers can check their account balance and print their monthly bill statements on the Internet with their unique username and password. Monthly bills are also emailed to customers. Each administrator is also given a username and a password to access information on customers and parking meters in the database on the Intranet for administrative purposes. As stated above, another feature of the system is to notify customers of parking time limit expirations. The system makes a phone call to customers specified telephone number fifteen minutes before the parking time limit expires. When the customer answers the phone, an audio message is streamed, alerting the customer about the parking time limit expiration. The minimum system requirements for a customer to pay for a parking meter is a personal radio frequency tag. To use the Web program, a user needs a standard PC with a 200 MHz processor, 64 MB of main memory and the Internet connection. The server requires a Windows XP operating system, Java Runtime Environment 1.3 or above, a MySQL database management system, an Apache web server, a VoiceXML service provider, a SMTP server, a 1.7 GHz processor, and 256 MB of main memory to operate.