In a joint project with our partner Swarco Denmark, all major parking lots in the city were equipped with cameras and Swarm Perception Boxes to monitor utilization. The data is used for a live parking guidance system installed in the city. Several signs provide real-time information on the occupancy of parking spaces in the city. Parking search traffic is significantly reduced by guiding vehicles directly to one of the 900 monitored parking spots.
The project started in January 2022 with detailed planning of eleven parking lots in the city. Together with the city of Holbæk, camera positions were determined and approved. The cameras and Perception Boxes were assembled and shipped to Holbæk. The installation of 75 camera streams and 35 sensor devices was performed by technicians from Swarco. Technical obstacles were solved along with remote support from Swarm Analytics, allowing the system to be installed in just a few days.
Next, the Perception Boxes were configured and parking regions were logically mapped together. Swarcos MyCity platform is used as the central processing system. Sensor data is integrated via MQTT events transmitted over a LTE connection. The MyCity platform accumulates the data and directly controls the on-site. As the Swarco platform is also used by other installations of our partner, the integration effort is quickly amortized and the middleware can be reused.
Most of the parking lots have multiple entry and exit points. Solutions based on passing barriers or induction loops would have been too expensive and error-prone. With the single- and multi-space parking configuration, up to 40 parking spaces are covered by a single camera and can be monitored directly. The Swarm Perception Box detects and counts vehicles of any type in the virtually defined parking areas and regularly sends the aggregated utilization values to the MyCity platform.
In the final project phase, from August to September, the system was tested and calibrated to provide high-quality data and pass acceptance tests. The total project timeline is four years.