Truck Parking Information and Management System with Pattern Analysis and Availability Prediction

With the significant increase of e-commerce, freight transportation demand has surged significantly over the past decade. Most of the demand has been served by trucks in the United States. One major problem commonly identified across the country is the worsening truck parking availability because the increase of truck parking facilities has lagged behind the growth of trucking activities. The lack of parking spaces and real-time parking availability information greatly exacerbate the uncertainty of trips, and often results in illegal and potentially dangerous parking or overtime driving. This paper elaborates on pilot research on improving truck parking facilities cooperated with the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), building and testing the advanced Truck Parking Information and Management System (TPIMS) with the real-time user visualization and prediction function empowered by artificial intelligence. Furthermore, by analyzing the activities of truck drivers, the researchers aggregated the regularity of truck parking patterns by a customized sequential similarity methodology. A Truck Parking Occupancy Prediction (TPOP) neural network for time-variant occupancy prediction by deep learning and attributes embedding is proposed and integrated into the TPIMS. The TPOP achieves 5.82%, 5.07%, 4.84%, and 4.19% mean average percentage error (MAPE) for 16, 8, 4, and 2 minutes ahead of occupancy prediction respectively, significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Clearly, the proposed solutions can benefit both the truck drivers and government agencies by a more efficient and smart TPIMS.

WSDOT Truck Parking Online Information Platform

Figure 1. The architecture of the proposed TPIMS in the pilot project. Six different parts are included in the system as follows: (a) illustration of the pilot TPIMS architecture; (b) radar-based wireless in-ground sensor made by the Sensys network; (c) the finished installation illustration of the in-ground radar sensor; (d) the finished installation of the wireless repeaters’ on the light pole; (e) the real-time surveillance video stream; (f) the real-time slot level parking status visualization website.