Vehicle Management In Smart Residential Community
Residential parking planning is crucial during residential project development and it has to abide by the golden rule of having the right number of right spaces in the right places. In achieving this goal, designers have to utilize high quality and actively used public realms;
housing developers have to meet their customers’ reasonable expectations, and occupiers or residents should enjoy their homes and neighbourhoods without upsetting their neighbours.
But, the ideal always contradicts with reality; shortage of parking space is a common problem in most of the residential areas. Most often, the number of cars is more than the number of available parking slots in a housing society. In such cases, it becomes important for the society to regularize the limited spaces for the welfare of all residents. In a strata building, the most common issues relating to parking, involve parking in another resident’s spot, parking on common property as well as blocking the parking spot of other residents or the entry/exit to the building’s parking areas.
The President of Institute Highway Engineers, Steve Spender once said that “Parking is a key issue for all communities, getting
it right is not just about minimizing conflict, it is
also about improving quality of life and better public realm provision.”
But as community members, they can’t change the parking infrastructure that comes as part and parcel when they move into the neighbourhood, but they can always improve the parking system for fast and secure access of the vehicles. Thus, vehicle parking traffic is one of the major concerns.
An efficient smart parking system consists of the following modules:
A. Parking Management Software
B. Access Control System
C. Control And Monitoring
D. Report Management
The idea to control human traffic raises the demand of residents and visitor management system. The system can range from the simple bookkeeping to a complicated cloud-based solution. The main focus here is to determine the rights of each person in the residential community. Vehicle traffic, on the other hand, is another important element to be controlled in a residential community. When residents drive into a residential community, the first concern is access permission, and the second concern is parking allocation. At high rise residential communities, residents can park at the basement parking or parking floors, while each unit at the residential community is assigned with dedicated parking lots. And the parking allocations are written inside the sales and purchase agreement. For landed residential communities, the handling might be different, but the concept is the same. Therefore, vehicle management is related to vehicle in/out operation and parking allocation. The residential community shall control the vehicles in/out operation systematically before managing the parking lots and payment issues.
The vehicle in/out control is very similar to human access control; just on a larger scale, together with more complicated hardware. There are 2 parts in the system. The first part includes the barriers (barrier, motor, controller board) and vehicle loop detector. The second part consists of the credential, scanner (to read/scan the credential from the vehicle), an access controller (to validate credential, to store access records and to command the access of the barrier controller) and computer (to install software and manage credentials, records as well as access rules).
The vehicle in/out control also applies to visitors. Some residential community committee allows visitors to drive in and park at the dedicated parking lots or just drive in to the enclave to drop-off or pick up the residents. Visitors, on the other hand, can register with the security office or management office before driving into the parking lots. Normally, visitors shall receive a receipt as proof that they are allowed by the security officers to access the neighbourhood. Some resident committees even issue an access card to visitors, whereby they can then use it to unlock the barrier gate with every in and out record being recorded into the system. We will discuss the visitor vehicle access management in the next chapter: Parking Management Software.
1. Parking Management Software
After vendors install the boom-gate or barrier gate and all the necessary hardware to control the in and out of every vehicle, the management of a residential community has to decide on a set of rules to restrict the residents parking behaviour as well as to register cars that are allowed inside the enclave according to the house owner’s allotments.
When discussing parking management software, we do not start with the hardware, but rather the software comes first. The resident committees must create rules to restrict the residents’ parking behaviors; and allocate parking lots to the unit owners according to their allotment from the sales & purchase agreement. A windows-based parking management software normally comes along with the parking barrier hardware, and it is also normally a standalone software, without much integration with other software applications. A community has to repeat setting up of their neighbourhood and resident/unit owner accounts in separately for different system, for example, accounting and billing system, visitor management system and vehicle management system and etc. Whereas if a smart community platform, it only required to set up once for multiple applications.
The second step is to list down the residents and their vehicle's information (quantities, types, and registration numbers). The data is key in a parking management software, whereas admins can further issue credentials (stickers or cards) and to set up the access rules.
Additionally, Admins can also allocate parking lots to residents and record the parking lot reference numbers along with the vehicle’s information. This is done to restrict residents in parking at the assigned parking lots only. In case residents do require more parking lots, the admins can discuss and apply charges to the residents when providing extra parking lots. All of the information will be kept in the parking management software. 
The parking management software comes together with an access controller (the hardware to command a barrier gate system; to be discussed in Section 2.0). It is beneficial to have software that allows Admins to systematically manage the data. However, a Windows-based software has several drawbacks:
- Isolated system: The data and records are all stored within the same computer (mostly located at the security guard office or the management office). Admins must be present at the computer in order to manage the software, data and reports.
- Vulnerable data storage: The data and records are stored within the same computer all the time. Admins must therefore perform regular backup action in order to prevent data loss whenever the computer or software is corrupted. However, data loss due to computer/software corrupt happens very frequently.
- Limited access right: Normally, the committee only allows the admins to access the system in terms of adding or removing the residents or vehicles data and to view the records or print reports. Residents on the other hand, cannot access the software even if the residents only wishes to view their personal access records.
- Lack of integration with 3rd party system: The software is designed to work with the access controller from the same manufacturer only. Additionally, the data is processed under a single software, whereby Admins cannot utilize the data in another 3rd party software for other purposes. In cases where the admins wish to integrate with another 3rd party software, the admin must request the vendor to customise it along with some charges.
- Maintenance and software upgrade: The vendor always charge a license fee to the software, either one-time off or on an annual basis. And there will be maintenance contract from the vendor when receiving their technical services, on site supports, troubleshooting and software upgrades. The vendor must likewise spend labour and time to travel on site in order to check and resolve the problem in the software. This kind of “In Situ” solution always occurs in Windows based software.
A cloud server is, therefore, a better solution to prevent the drawbacks of a Windows-based software. We can see the rise of cloud storage (for example iCloud, Google Drive, One Drive) and cloud software (for example Microsoft 365, Adobe Cloud). Thanks to the rapid growth of the Internet infrastructure and speed, cloud solutions now feel like a local computer software, without the delays or lags. When a system is upgraded to a cloud solution, it always comes with another powerful tool - the smartphone Mobile App. You can have photos stored in Google Photo as well as a Google Photo Mobile App inside your smartphone; you can upload a file from your iPhone to the iCloud as well as review it from your computer at the iCloud page.
Having a cloud server to handle the parking management software is thus definitely an upgrade to the residential community, whereby Admins can manage the residents and vehicles information all on the Web page.
Admins can further configure the access rules, permission, parking lots allocation at the cloud server as well.
When residents moves in or out from the residential community, the admins can also login to the cloud server to add or remove the vehicle and parking information.
Besides, Admins can also change the vehicle access credentials from the conventional cards to Mobile App access permission. This allows the residents to ignore access cards and utilize the Mobile App to access the barrier gate.
We will discuss more regarding the operation, working mechanism and the benefits of using the cloud server as well as the Mobile App in the vehicle management system at 5. The IoT Enabled Vehicle Management System.
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