Predictive Analytics for Smart Parking: A Deep Learning Approach in Forecasting of IoT Data

Nowadays, a sustainable and smart city focuses on energy efficiency and the reduction of polluting emissions through smart mobility projects and initiatives to "sensitize"infrastructure. Smart parking is one of the building blocks of intelligent mobility, innovative mobility that aims to be flexible, integrated, and sustainable and consequently integrated into a Smart City. By using the Internet of Things (IoT) sensors located in the parking areas or the underground car parks in combination with a mobile application, which indicates to citizens the free places in the different areas of the city and guides them toward the chosen parking, it is possible to reduce air pollution and fluidifying noise traffic. In this article, we present and discuss an innovative Deep Learning-based ensemble technique in forecasting the parking space occupancy to reduce the search time for parking and to optimize the flow of cars in particularly congested areas, with an overall positive impact on traffic in urban centres. A genetic algorithm has also been used to optimize predictors parameters. The main goal is to design an intelligent IoT-based service that can predict, in the next few hours, the parking spaces occupancy of a street. The proposed approach has been assessed on a real IoT dataset composed by over than 15M of collected sensor records. Obtained results demonstrate that our method outperforms both single predictors and the widely used strategy of the mean providing inherently robust predictions.