Functionality Analysis

Discuss about the Council of Barchester Operated Seven Car Parking System.

The City Council of Barchester operated seven car parking system. The council of Barchester has proposed for the development of a new car parking system with an enhanced facility of controlling the operations of parking. The system needs to provide the daily operational functionalities including handling payments, issuing tickets and controlling the barriers for entry and exit of the car after successful verifications. This particular assignment includes the in-depth analysis of the functionality; the resource required and provides a feasibility study of developing the car parking system in the centre of Barchester.

The advanced car parking system of Barchester needs to control the entry, exit and payment for the customers. Every time any customer enters the parking area, the entry barrier detects the car and through the sensors located under the road surface and the LCD is flashed with the further operations. With the given specification of the customer, the entry barrier prints the ticket containing the data and time of the entry. The ticket is further checked and analysed during the exit of the car from the parking area. In addition to that, the system automatically calculated the fees of the parking based on the date and time of the ticket issued during entry.

The operational system must check for the availability of spaces before issuing the tickets to the customers. The new system needs to check the availability and issue the ticket to the customer within no more than five seconds. In the case of the seasonal customer, the system verifies the card and record of the entry time are inputted in to the database within the same time limit of five seconds. The most common error in the system is the printing of the ticket. In many cases, the barcode in the ticket becomes unreadable and where the customer is sent to the office for manual verification and calculation of the fees. In addition to that, the system can check the availability of the spaces in the parking lot. 

The operation system automatically increases the number by one every time a new car enters the parking area. The payment for the parking is made efficiently with the identification of the invalid coins and notes inserted to make the payment. The LCD on the entry and exit barrier allows the customer to view the availability, fees and parking tie of the cars. The system further calculated the fee of the cars based on the entry time within the limit of two seconds. Therefore, the developed parking system can efficiently control the parking, fee calculation and availability checking of the parking lot in Barchester.

Resources Required

For the development of the enhanced car paring system in the Barchester, the requirement of the system is – human resource, hardware resource and software resource. The financial recourse for developing and maintained of the system is outside the scope of the project.

Human Resource:  For the development of the system, Software developers, hardware implementers, security managers, testers, employees are needed (Suhr, & Jung, 2014, p-26). The software developers of the system will be developing the functionality of the car parking system including the verification, checking of the space availability and issuing the tickets to the users. The tester will check and examine the functionality and efficient working of the developed system (Geng, & Cassandras, 2013, p-1134). Moreover, the security managers present in the parking lot will assist the customers with any problems and issues with the system including problems in fee calculation and payments.

Hardware Requirement: For the implementation of the required car parking system, sensors, ticket printing system, cameras for recording security footage, LCD displays for showing the process and fee of the customer are required. In addition to that, the system requires a database for storing the information and data for the users including their entry and exit time in the parking area for at least one year (Nawaz, Efstratiou, & Mascolo, 2013, p-77). The back end office of the system will require computers having access to the database and real time information about the parking area.

Software Requirements: The new car parking system requires developing an application for sensing the car approaching that will display the availability of space in the parking area. The operating system developed will be compatible with Windows that support the TCP/IP protocol for communication and sharing of information (Byun et al., 2013, p-72). The communication interface between the different entry barriers will be facilitated through Ethernet network. The database of the system should be able to handle large volume of data for maintenance and security reasons. In addition to that, the software needs to be efficiently calculating the fees for the intended customer.

The feasibility study of the system reveals the strength and weakness of the proposed car parking system.

The purpose of the new car parking system is to provide its customer automatic car parking facility with an efficient calculation of the time and fees required for a particulate parking. The system also aims at providing daily operations efficiently, for example, issuing tickets, validating the seasonal customers with the card.

Feasibility Study

The car parking system is an application system developed for efficient issuing of tickets and management of the car parking facility in Barchester. The scope of the developed system is to issue the tickets and check the availability of the parking space efficiently within a time limit of maximum five seconds. The developed system will provide a real-time and easy solution to manage congestion and high traffic in the parking area. The system will further update the database whenever a car enters and leaves the parking area.

The cost required for maintenance, equipment, staffing, security and managing operations are within the scope of the project.

For developing the car parking system, the SDLC model will be followed. The software development life cycle is followed in the development of the information system (Caniels, & Bakens, 2012, p-166).  The following phase will be followed in the development of the car parking system-

Planning: In the planning phase, the feasibility study and requirements of the system are identified. 

Analysis: The analyses of the risks factor in the developed car parking system are identified in this phase (Joslin, & Muller, 2015, p-1377).

Design: The implementation of the car parking system including the database is storing, issuing the parking tickets are developed in this phase.

Implementation: The system is developed in the parking area including the implementation of the hardware and software.

Maintenance: In this phase, the system is marinated for any risks and problems.

Various risks are involved with the development of the car parking system.

Conclusion

The development of the car parking system will provide the City Council of Barchester to efficiently operate the seven car parking system. The proposed system will provide efficiency in the issuing ticket, maintain the parking area, and effectively calculate the fees required for each parking customer. The development process will involve in the identification and management of the risks involved in the system for car parking.  Therefore, the development of the proposed system will prove to be profitable for managing high traffic in car parking area.

References

Byun, J., Hong, I., Lee, B., & Park, S. (2013). Intelligent household LED lighting system considering energy efficiency and user satisfaction. IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 59(1), 70-76.

Caniëls, M. C., & Bakens, R. J. (2012). The effects of Project Management Information Systems on decision making in a multi project environment. International Journal of Project Management, 30(2), 162-175.

Geng, Y., & Cassandras, C. G. (2013). New “Smart Parking” system based on resource allocation and reservations. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 14(3), 1129-1139.

Joslin, R., & Müller, R. (2015). Relationships between a project management methodology and project success in different project governance contexts. International Journal of Project Management, 33(6), 1377-1392.

Kerzner, H. R. (2013). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Nawaz, S., Efstratiou, C., & Mascolo, C. (2013, September). Parksense: A smartphone based sensing system for on-street parking. In Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Mobile computing & networking (pp. 75-86). ACM.

Spundak, M. (2014). Mixed agile/traditional project management methodology–reality or illusion?. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 119, 939-948.

Suhr, J. K., & Jung, H. G. (2014). Sensor fusion-based vacant parking slot detection and tracking. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 15(1), 21-36.