Research on shared parking allocation considering the heterogeneity of parking slot providers’ temporary parking demand

Studies on the allocation of parking demand during the sharing period primarily focus on public parking users, ignoring parking slot providers' temporary parking demand with heterogeneity. Therefore, this paper takes the allocation of parking slot providers' temporary parking demand as the research object and establishes a differentiated parking allocation (DPA) model to maximize the platform's net profit. The model is solved using the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm and compared with the First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) algorithm. Then, the platform adopts differentiated or undifferentiated charge measures when charging for the parking slot providers' temporary parking demand. The numerical analysis is performed to select three indicators for evaluation: 1) the utilization rate, 2) the net profit, and 3) the degree of time fragmentation. Results show that the ACO algorithm has an excellent optimization effect in allocating, and the differentiated allocation-undifferentiated charges for the parking slot providers' temporary parking demand is feasible.