Resumen
Major cities encounter traffic problems every day, whereby the studies of IBM (2011) showed that drivers looking for a parking spot have a large impact on urban traffic. This paper presents an approach for a park spot route (PSR) in a city using on-street parking information. The result is a route through streets with high parking probabilities close to the destination, where the drivers decide where to park their car. The proposed method is based on the A* algorithm, first presented by Hart et al. (1968), a shortest path algorithm developed from the Dijkstra algorithm. The A* algorithm inherits the easy implementation and possibility for adaption from Dijkstra, but has a shorter computational time. For the park spot route the cost function of the A* is adapted that it does not only take the travel time on a road segment, but also the parking probability on this segment into account. The main purpose of the paper is to present a suitable cost function that limits these two variables into one common interval so that they have the same impact on the route choice. The development of the presented park spot routing algorithm is based on a street network with road segments and road crossings, with conventional road attributes, such as speed limits on the road segments, lengths of the segments and parking probabilities per road link. Simulation results for the city of Munich showed that adapting the A* algorithm leads to routes with higher parking probabilities. Finally, a short outlook on possible scenarios will be given, since the algorithm should be applied to different cities.