A PROBABILISTIC APPROACH TO EVALUATE STRATEGIES FOR SELECTING A PARKING SPACE

Upon entering the parking Lot of a facility, a driver must select a pa rking space. This paper proposes and evaluates strategies which are in tended to find a ''good'' parking space. Three performance measures ar e defined for evaluating the ''goodness'' of a selected parking space. One of these is based on. the amount of walking required of the custo mer, another is based on the amount of driving required, and the third is a combination of the first two and represents the time required fo r the customer to reach the front door of the facility. Two strategies are defined for selecting a parking space. The fi:rst is simple and s omewhat 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 somewha t ''typical'' configuration. This approach treats driver decisions and parking space availability as random experiments, and uses conditiona l probability to evaluate the performance of the strategies.