EZ-Park: An Innovative Secure M-Commerce Application

M-Commerce today is an explosively growing industry with new applications being born continuously. This paper will explore a proposed m-commerce application, a Parking Reservation Agent we will call EZ-Park. We will discuss some scalability options, business model options, and security considerations of this Parking Reservation Agent. We will first focus on how to use the proposed technology with one of the simplest models by considering the context of a single college or university. Then we will expand to a model showing how to scale to a national or international system of drivers without predefined parking requirements. A basic prototype of this technology is also being developed to test the concept. 1. A “Parking Reservation” Agent (EZPark): Centralized Model The basic idea here is that a person should be able to reserve a parking spot dynamically while he or she is on the way to the destination parking lot. This saves the person from having to drive around looking for a parking spot, decreases the need for dedicated parking spots that must be reserved 24 hours a day for Very Important Persons (VIPs), and can be used as a marketing mechanism to increase popularity of participating retailers. Different environments may use the application in a different way but each implementation model should be interoperable. The first requirement to consider is a university that does not have enough parking places for everyone to park. First we will describe the situation, as it exists today. Assume there exists Student parking lots, Faculty & Staff parking lots, Metered parking lots, and a few 24X7 Special Reserved parking spots (for Deans, Presidents, and Program Directors). Only Deans, Presidents, and Program Directors have the option to pay the a higher premium fee and get a 24X7 Special Reserved parking spot instead of paying the normal fee for the right to park in the Faculty & Staff parking lots. Students pay a fee to park in the student parking lot, or may elect to take their chances at finding a metered parking spot. The problem is the parking lots are normally too full to easily find a parking spot. Faculty members are often found driving up and down the lanes of parking spots looking for spots and hoping someone will leave a spot open just as they are approaching. The Faculty & Staff parking lots are several blocks away from each other, so Faculty members waste valuable time driving from parking lot to parking lot when they cannot find a spot in their favorite lot. A faculty member who has paid for a Faculty Plus parking sticker will request a reserved parking spot via his or her mobile device when he or she is enroute to the University. Requests should be made up to a maximum of 15 minutes prior to arrival time. Upon receipt of a parking reservation request from an authorized faculty member, the EZ-Park server will select a parking spot for the user and will change the sign by the empty parking spot from “Open to Faculty” to “Reserved for UserName”. The parking spot that gets reserved for the user will be based on availability and faculty location preferences as recorded during the registration process. If there are no spots available when the request is made, the EZ-Park server will put the request into a queue and assign the user to the next spot that becomes available within the user’s predefined acceptable location parameters. In this case the user will receive status updates throughout the process (i.e. “You are 3 in the queue”, “You are 2 in the queue”, “Your are next in the queue”, “Spot # XXX has been reserved for you”, etc.).