Travelling in Smart Cities

With the advancement of societies, the development of technology and the prevailing dependence on technology, travelling in cities needs an effective application to keep pace with technological progress. Smart cities can be defined as a destination that adopts an interactive management style and aims to enhance the visitor’s quality of life by using smart technologies. (Çeltek, 2020). Travelling in a city might mean visiting shopping malls, places of interests to tourists, universities’ campuses, airports, etc. When visiting these places by traditional methods (by car), the visitor needs to park the car in a timely manner. Usually the car park consists of several floors & a large number of parking lots. One of the problems that might face the visitor is locating an empty parking space. Another problem is remembering where the visitor parked his/her car. The places the travelers visit usually consist of offices, shops, departments, etc. Locating these places might be difficult especially if the place is large. Using these smart methods, the management in these places might provide some useful information that they can to share with the visitors, such as promotions, updates, visiting hours, contact details, etc. The management can also use these methods to get statistical data about the number of visitors per hour, day, week, etc. The proposed system will be used by the traveler were it can show the available parking spaces on a real time basis. Once the traveler parks the car, he/she can check-in the parking. Whenever the traveler decides to leave then finding the location where the car was parked is easy and it can be retrieved from the application. The application will keep a history of all the places that the traveler has checked in. This information might be useful for the traveler. The system will automatically send useful information (e.g. promotions) to the visitor once checked in. This might be useful for both the visitor and the management as the visitor will get the useful information as soon as he/she arrives to the destination. From the management perspective this might increase the number of visitors in that place. For the graduation project we plan to design a system for one shopping mall in Sohar city. In the future we will include other cities and other destinations (hospitals, airports, universities, etc.). Our system’s server will be located at the shopping mall. It will contain a database which will include live information about the parking lots, directory map, and useful information to be shared with the visitors. An android mobile application will be developed to be used the travelers. The project aims to facilitate and organize services and implement the smart cities travelling system.