A scalable parking and valet management system

Tag B Group is well-known transportation, parking, garage management, and valet service provider based in Washington, D.C. It wanted to create a scalable solution to maintain a full parking and valet management system for multiple users.

• It was difficult for TagB group to manage parking and valet services without a proper system. There was no way to see real-time data from diverse users, such as customers, parking lot owners, etc.
• Managing a proper record of locations and parking criteria, manually scheduling parking, and allocating valet services on time was difficult.
• Users have to either manage without reservations or suffer from lags in parking lot bookings.
• There was no method to acquire useful insights into user behavior. Therefore, it was impossible to make data-driven decisions for business growth.
• To make infrastructure management easy to manage and less error prone.
• To manage common access and security requirements.
• The client wanted a reliable and secure code.
• The client wanted a highly available and low cost infrastructure.

Intuitive and engaging applications:

• Mobile and web applications were developed to build a consolidated platform for multiple users (super admin, admins, clients, business users, etc.) We created three applications for three different platforms: Android, an iOS mobile
  application, and a web application.
• Using cloud-based tools, we developed seamless user experiences across all applications.
• After we delivered the solution, there has been a 20% increase in the number of parking spaces managed by TagB.
• Examples of users include i. customers who want to save time by pre-reserving parking places for their automobiles. ii. Parking lot owners that wish to keep track of what’s going on in their lots. iii. Super admins oversee the centralized
  system, which can be accessible via the web and mobile apps. Other users include enforcement workers, guest users,
  admins, and more.

Secure and robust architecture:

• A system with microservices-based architecture was developed for efficiently handling various third-party as well as custom-developed integrations. It includes payment integrations and multiple user modules. The database architecture
  was designed using the cloud-based service Amazon RDS.

User modules & business dashboards:

• Various user modules were created, including super admin, admin, customer, clients, enforcement staff, etc.
• We created a strong set of dashboards, reports, and visualizations that provide precise information for day-to-day activities across the platform. Super admins, for example, will be able to see activities undertaken by clients, admins,
  customers, and others across the platform. Clients who owns parking lots would be able to see daily activities through the dashboard as well.
• Using the detailed analytics that we provided, the client could identify that the 13:45 to 16:45 time slot is rush hour for their business. The client also was able to unearth the insight that the 3 hour slot was its best selling slot.
• The users were able to save 40% time as compared to previous system in finding the parking space

Payment & refund management:

• Created a safe and reliable payment management system that allows users to add several payment methods. The refunds will be made in the same manner as the original payment. Payment statuses can be updated by super admins
  or clients as pending, received, refunded, or advanced.

Integration with LPR camera:

• We developed a system that can be integrated with a License Plate Recognition(LPR) camera. The camera captures the plate numbers of the vehicles entering and exiting the parking lot. The system either stores it for later review or runs the image through video analytics software. Further, it compares it with license plate numbers database records for verification.

Easy and secure Infrastructure management:

• Our DevOps team has used the AWS CloudFormation for defining cloud infrastructure as code. When it comes to microservice architecture it is very hard to manage with monolithic infrastructure.
• To efficiently manage our infra with high availability and low budget our DevOps experts have set up frontend service on CDN networking which are serving private Amazon S3 bucket data. The backend services are running on Amazon ECS service. Apart from that Amazon RDS is set up for data tier.
• Another concern was that of minimum budget utilization. We have implemented an AWS ECS service container as a service (CAAS) platform for resolving this issue. We have used AWS cloud formation for automation of all our network
  resources.

Manage common access:

• Our DevOps experts used the Networking VPC ,Subnet, NAT gateway and AWS IAM service with custom user policy and less privileged resources to help the client manage common access

Provided a reliable and secure code:

• Our DevOps engineers used SonarQube to automate code analysis and review. The tool also helps the developers identify potential security vulnerabilities in the code, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Also, we have used Jenkins for ci-cd pipeline automation.