The Opportunity
There are many reasons why a company moves premises and more often than not it comes as a positive result of out-growing physical capacity. When our client moved into their new office in Mohali, they gained more (and expertly designed) interior space.
However, each tenant in the building was allocated a limited number of parking slots. As the exterior space was effectively downsized, employees driving to the office were now battling over a select few designated parking spaces. They needed a fair and more democratic way to assign these available spots – and fast!
The Solution
The company had brainstormed solutions, everything from car decals to designated days or even assigned spots. SourceFuse’s proposed solution was a mobile application that would keep track of open parking spots, using a series of QR codes, that both drivers and parking lot attendants would use. The requirement to go live in just a few days led to the creation of a multi-tenant parking mobile application.
Using a Serverless Lambda DynamoDB framework, SourceFuse designed the ‘Parking App’ with two interfaces: one for the guard or parking attendant and one for employees needing to park their car. Every day, the application would generate a new QR code on the employee’s smartphone, prohibiting someone from taking a screenshot and re-using the code from the day before.
The guard’s interface has a built-in camera scanner to scan and validate the QR code and provide an accurate inventory of available and occupied parking spaces.
One of the main conveniences of the application is that both employees and attendants are notified via push notifications when the parking lot is full and the number of free parking spaces available.
The application was deployed using the AWS Serverless framework, which was used to deploy and set-up an AWS API Gateway and run AWS Lambda functions. AWS Cognito was set-up independently to provide access control to the mobile application.
The Results
- Low Cost: Leveraging AWS pay-as-you-use pricing model, and with AWS DynamoDB being serverless, the company is not having to pay for unused capacity i.e. the Lambdas are only running for brief periods of time, in the mornings and then again in the evenings, and not required to run for the whole day.
- Ease of Tracking: Using QR codes the number of available parking spots is effortless. The maximum number of spots for each tenant is stored via AWS DynamoDB database, which is automatically queried whenever a QR is scanned.
- Access Control: To ensure authorized access to the parking area, only users with the company email domain can register. To maximize security, the application also uses multi-factor authentication via AWS Cognito.
- Unbiased Parking: The main motive behind creating the parking app was to enable unbiased parking on a ‘first come, first serve’ basis. And since the entire parking area is used by multiple companies, the new app can allocate the number of assigned parking spots to each company profile.
