Have you ever tried parking a car in Sliema at 9am? Upon arriving at a desired location, drivers are often unable to find available parking spaces and waste time cruising the destination, searching for a vacant parking spot. This scenario results in unnecessary fuel consumption, increased pollution and frustration as well as road congestion. Add to this a broken air conditioner and August temperatures, and apocalypse is served.

Many countries with high population density and developed road networks face similar problems. There is a lack of parking management facilities in private and public parking spaces, both indoors and outdoors. In Malta, the situation is exacerbated due to inadequate public transport and the  country’s small size combined with excessive vehicle overload (there are over 350,000 motor vehicles registered on the island!).

Computer systems can manage car parks and avoid traffic congestion, resulting in a smoother experience for the driver. Even though certain localities such as Sliema and St Julian’s have private multi-level parking areas with basic IT infrastructure, unfortunately these do not always make use of the full potential that computerised systems can offer.

The most common sight are screens at the entry gates that indicate the number of available parking spaces based on monitoring the in-and-out movement of vehicles. Bearing in mind that car parks are sometimes large and multi-level, drivers would still require at least a vague indication as to where the available parking space is located.

To improve on this, local research has been conducted working towards a fully automated and intelligent parking management system for indoor and outdoor spaces (including parking in streets). Dubbed Inteliparking, it makes use of image recognition techniques that are capable of recognising vehicle licence plates. A device installed in each parking space is used to moni­tor the area and store its status (vacant or occupied). Using a simple interface via a mobile app, each device can then be plotted on a map as a marker and users can interact with these. Therefore, it becomes easy to scan for parking availability within a desired distance. Users of Inteliparking can also pre-book parking spaces, giving rise to a colour-coded system with green – vacant, red – occupied, and amber – pre-booked.

The next goal is to find commercial partners and develop Inteli­parking into a viable product. Any technological advance that helps us reduce stress from mundane tasks (such as parking) is a step in the right direction!

Matthew Borg Carr is a software developer and undertook the re­search and development behind Inteliparking, an Intelligent Parking Management System, as part of his undergraduate thesis  at Middlesex University.

Did you know?

• Grapes explode when you put them in the microwave.

• Unless food is mixed with saliva you can’t taste it.

• In 1552 a Hapsburg prince brought an elephant from Spain back to Vienna but it died in the cold climate shortly thereafter.

• In spite of the mishap with the elephant, Vienna is home to the world’s oldest zoo, the Tiergarten Schönbrunn.

• Erwin Schrödinger discovered wave mechanics during a two-and-a-half-week vacation at a villa in the Swiss Alps taking with him only de Broglie’s thesis, and an old Viennese girlfriend (whose identity remains a mystery).

For more trivia see: www.um.edu.mt/think.

Sound Bites

• Being inspired by nature is common when developing ground-breaking technologies. Mechanical engineers at Stanford University tried to imitate natural organisms that cover distance by growing, for example vines, fungi and nerve cells, to produce a soft robot that grows to move through various obstacles.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170720155311.htm

• Coral bleaching is one of the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems. Researchers from the University of New South Wales, Australia, have found a solution to tackle this issue. They used genetic engineering to alter micro­algae found in corals, enhancing their stress tole­rance to ocean warming.

www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-07/f-ast072017.php

To find out some more interesting science news listen in on Radio Mocha on every Monday and Friday at 13:00 on Radju Malta 2.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.