Manual searching for vacant parking spaces in shopping malls is a tedious process, especially during the weekends and public holidays. It is rather troublesome for consumers to drive around without any directions in search for an empty parking space. Previous studies have confirmed that majority of the drivers experience difficulties in finding a vacant parking space in multilevel car parks and often spend more than 10 minutes searching for parking lots on weekends and public holidays. Current solutions available are probably expensive to implement in terms of hardware and software requirements for shopping malls in developing economies such as Malaysia. Furthermore, the process of payment of parking fee at an Autopay machine is not only bothersome but avoidable. Although leaving a car park may not be as tedious as finding a vacant parking lot, it is still considered a time-consuming activity to most drivers. If given the chance, most people would choose to avoid the trouble of walking to an Autopay machine due to finding incessant long queues or shortage of change at the machine. Advanced societies have adopted Touch`n'Go system which is more convenient than the conventional Autopay system. However, developing economies like Malaysia are still using the manual parking as well as Autopay machine. This study presents a low cost intelligent parking system for developing countries shopping malls to mitigate the above challenges. The system provides an added safety and security measures to prevent crimes such as thefts, kidnapping, vandalism and accidents. The system proposed takes advantage of the fact that smartphones have become pervasive.
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