Parking Garage Integration
Overview
The Flexopus parking bookings system can be integrated with a parking management hardware system. The following use case can be covered using the integration:
- User create a parking reservation in Flexopus. The reservation includes the vehicle plate number. The reservation is a full-day reservation.
- The reservation will be registered in real time in the parking management system.
- When the user arrives at the parking garage, a camera recognizes the vehicle plate number and opens the parking barrier for the user. The user can enter and leave the garage during the day, without limitations.
- The permission to enter the garage will end at the end of the day, if there is no follow-up reservation created for the next day.
Parking garage limit
You can configure in the system integration how many parking spots you have. You cannot have more cars in the garage as this limit.
Example: If you have 100 parking spots, you can have only 100 cars in the garage at the same time.
Hardware specifications
The hardware for the integration can be adapted generally to an existing parking barrier hardware. The system detects the vehicle plate numbers and send them to the cloud, the system also sends the signals for the barrier to open and close.
The following parking barriers are supported currently:
- SCHEIDT & BACHMANN
- SKIDATA
- DeSigna
- Many others.
Use cases
The following use cases can be handled currently with the integration.
Book in advance
User can create a parking spot reservation using their smartphones in advance. The reservation will be created for the full day. In case the users are not deleting their reservations, they can enter and leave the parking garage at any time. The list of vehicles with an active reservation will be synchronized into the parking management system every day at midnight.
Book on the same day
In case somebody creates a reservation on the same day, the reservation will be registered in real time and the user can enter the parking garage.
Deleting a reservation
In case a user deletes their reservation, we differentiate between two cases:
- Car is in the garage
If the car is in the garage, the reservation cannot be deleted. - Car is NOT in the garage
If the car is NOT in the garage, then the reservation can be deleted. The deletion will also delete the vehicle registration in the parking management system.
Guest access with preregistration
In case a guest is planning to enter the parking garage, you will need to register their car via Flexopus in the same way. You can restrict a few parking spots for guests.
Permanent access
You can register permanent access rights for some cars. Example: company cars, service cars, etc. We recommend blocking the parking spots for these cars and assigning fixed parking spots to them.
Overstay: domino effect
Generally, the system reserves the parking spots on the daily basis and expects the vehicle owners to leave the garage at latest until 23:59.
Problem:
If they are not leaving the garage, they are considered as car with “overstay”. They will be able to leave the parking garage at any time, without limitation, however the parking spot is probably reserved by another user on the following they and they will find an occupied parking spot when they arrive.
This will confuse the new user, which will occupy another parking spot, which is most likely reserved by another user and so on. This can cause a domino effect in the parking garage, just because of one false parker.
Solution proposal:
To avoid this domino effect to an overstay, we recommend having a few fallback parking spots, which can be used by the user in this case.
Overstay: N+1
The system does not allow entering the parking garage, if there are more cars, then parking spots.
Problem
This is normally not a problem, until somebody starts to use the parking garage without a reservation. The car without a reservation will take 1 car place from the limit. This can cause an overstay domino effect. For this, we have a solution with the fallback parking spots, however in case the garage is full, then the last car will not be able to enter the garage.
Example: You have 95 parking spots and there are 95 reservations for today. 6 cars are staying overnight without a reservation. This will prevent the last arriving car to entering the garage.
Solution proposal:
Do not allow cars to stay overnight. In case they stay, have some fallback parking spots. In case they do it regularly, then charge them with a rule breaking fee for an unfair parking garage usage or limit their rights to the parking garage for a limited time.