A Probabilistic Approach to Evaluate Strategies for Selecting a Parking Space

C. Richard Cassady and John E. Kobza
Additional contact information
C. Richard Cassady: Department of Industrial Engineering, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, Mississippi 39762
John E. Kobza: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061

Transportation Science, 1998, vol. 32, issue 1, 30-42

Abstract: Upon entering the parking lot of a facility, a driver must select a parking space. This paper proposes and evaluates strategies which are intended to find a “good” parking space. Three performance measures are defined for evaluating the “goodness” of a selected parking space. One of these is based on the amount of walking required of the customer, another is based on the amount of driving required, and the third is a combination of the first two and represents the time required for the customer to reach the front door of the facility. Two strategies are defined for selecting a parking space. The first is simple and somewhat conservative, whereas the second strategy is more complicated and aggressive. A probabilistic approach is used to evaluate the three performance measures for each strategy using a parking lot of somewhat “typical” configuration. This approach treats driver decisions and parking space availability as random experiments, and uses conditional probability to evaluate the performance of the strategies.

Date: 1998
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.32.1.30 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ortrsc:v:32:y:1998:i:1:p:30-42

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().