Team Stuttgart-Continental

Problem:
Truck drivers have to take mandatory breaks after every 4 1⁄2 hours. However, a lot of times they cannot meet the requirements due to overcrowded service stations and a shortage of available parking spaces. The “Vereinigung deutscher Autohöfe” claims that there is a lack of approximately 20.000 parking spots for trucks. This number will most likely increase since it is estimated that freight transport in Germany will increase at about 4% annually1. At the moment, truck drivers find alternative solutions for this problem by parking at the entry and exit of such service stations as well as illegally on the side of the road. However, those actions cause dangerous situations for all traffic participants and increase the risk of accidents. If the driver exceeds the legal driving period, he and his employer can be charged with high fees that can amount up to 30 EUR per hour for the driver and 180 EUR for his employer2.

Solution:
We develop a smartphone app which helps truck drivers to find a parking spot. The app anonymously tracks how many of our users are currently at a service station. Based on this data we can tell if it’s likely that there are free spaces available. With the use of big data our app can learn patterns and predict future traffic flow. This helps us suggest the best time for the truck driver to take a break. The tracking via the app gives a good base to approximate the overall parking situation even for smaller parking lots where it wouldn’t be financially viable to install an automatic tracking system. Service stations who have installed tracking systems can be integrated with our APIs. In return they get access to our analysis tool to generate interesting business insights from the data they already have.

Competitors:
Currently there are two types of competitors on the market of measuring parking occupancy – apps that rely on consumer generated information and apps that work with technological methods.
The app Truck Parking Europe already has a user base of 100.000 users. The database contains truck parking areas, service stations as well as parking possibilities off the road and monitors about 23.000 parking areas with all in all about 300.000 spaces3. The status of occupancy, however, is reported and updated based on consumer generated content by the community members and the editorial team of Truck Parking Europe4. Since the service strongly depends on the effort and participation of its users there are only a few geographical areas where more and current information is provided.