A Model for an Enterprise Automated RFID-Based Pay and Park System

Abstract

Traffic management is one of the challenging problems in urban cities as vehicle owners look for where to park and queue to pay for rented car parks usually on an hourly basis. Therefore, the choice of a suitable, reliable and flexible architecture for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based pay and park system readily comes to mind. It is assumed in this work that the parking lot is already known and secured by the vehicle owner in a closed car park; this paper therefore seeks to address and automate the billing system for enterprise car parks. To achieve this, a reliable and accurate enterprise star topology networked RFID based system, that computes the amount to be paid by a user which is calculated based on the time the user enters and exits the park, and the amount the park owner is charging at a particular point in time is proposed for the automated pay and park system. The system comprises of both software and hardware components integrated together. The developed prototype system is able to grant authorized users access to the park within 30ms after verification and open the barrier in 30ms whenever the emergency button is pressed for safety consideration.