A probabilistic approach to evaluate strategies for selecting a parking space

Upon entering the parking lot of a facility, a driver must select a parking space. This paper proposes and evaluates strategies which are intended to find a ‘good’ parking space. Three performance measures are defined for evaluating the ‘goodness’ of a selected parking space. One of these is based on the amount of walking required of the customer, another is based on the amount of driving required, and the third is a combination of the first two and represents the time required for the customer to reach the front door of the facility. Two strategies are defined for selecting a parking space. The first is simple and somewhat conservative, whereas the second strategy is more complicated and aggressive. A probabilistic approach is used to evaluate the three performance measures for each strategy using a parking lot of somewhat ‘typical’ configuration. This approach treats driver decisions and parking space availability as random experiments, and uses conditional probability to evaluate the performance of the strategies.