Architecture and negotiation protocols for a smart parking system

Abstract

Smart City uses emerging technologies to improve citizens’ quality of life. A branch of this topic is the Smart Parking, where the parking system implements intelligent mechanisms to simplify to the searching of parking spots and consequently decrease the traffic of cars. This work proposes an architecture using Multi-Agent System (MAS), enhanced with some holonic systems principles, that is capable to be applied to different range of parking systems, e.g., considering trucks, cars, or bicycles. Being a distributed architecture, a special attention is devoted to study the negotiation protocols that will regulate the behavior of autonomous and cooperative actors in the system, namely drivers and parking spots, during allocation process of parking spots to drivers. For this purpose, the Contract Net Protocol (CNP), English Auction, Dutch Auction and Faratin Auction were the tested, being the CNP the selected protocol for this problem. Also addressing the distributed nature of the system, some efforts were focused on the security of the messages exchanged between the agents was proposed using Secure Socket Layer (SSL). The proposed multi-agent systems architecture was implemented using JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment Framework), which is a FIPA-compliant agent development framework that simplifies the development of agent-based applications. The exchange of messages follows the FIPA-ACL protocol using the CNP protocol for the negotiation. The communication between the agents and the User Interface is performed through the use of Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol.