Nicholas Moore was concerned about finding a place to park on campus and potentially being late to class. The senior aerospace engineering major was scheduled to take an exam and didn’t need any more stress added to his afternoon.

In the past, Moore would have just crossed his fingers and prayed to find a spot without circling the lots over and over. But this year, thanks to a class project Moore was involved with, there was another solution. Moore opened the new VolPark app, which utilizes crowdsourced data to provide real-time parking lot occupancies and deliver guided navigation to the best available parking areas based on a user’s permit type.

“I was a little concerned on where I could park, because with Commuter Intermediate status, you only have so many places to park on campus and sometimes they’re full,” Moore said. “But by being able to refer to the app, I knew which Commuter Intermediate lot was available, and all I had to do was just arrive there.”

Moore was one of several engineering students who worked on solutions to alleviate the parking problem on the University of Tennessee campus through their classes in the Heath Integrated Business and Engineering Program.

Through interviews, prototypes, and cost-analysis research, the Heath IBEP students assisted UT Parking & Transportation in finding solutions that would ease the parking angst across more than 150 parking areas on campus. The app was developed by ParkZen, with the Heath IBEP teams providing valuable input and suggestions.

“The features that the students wanted, most of those recent changes to the app over the last six months have come from that work that the Heath IBEP students have done,” said Brad Heaton, the interim director of parking administration at UT. “They were really guiding the roadmap, and it’s going to benefit not just our university, but other campuses that are starting to use it as well.”

Upgrading Parking Solutions

In August of 2023, UT Parking & Transportation was approached by Bob Buckner, director of the Heath IBEP and Gary Null, ISE assistant department head for undergraduate affairs and assistant professor of practice, about potential parking spot availability projects.

They collaborated to develop projects that would provide Heath IBEP students the ability to research, test, and analyze potential solutions and provide recommendations that could assist UTPT in managing the unprecedented growth and demand the university is experiencing in parking.

Null incorporated the projects into his Engineering Fundamentals 203 and 303 classes that help students develop the skills and understanding necessary for effective engineering and business collaborations.

Multiple teams of students worked on the parking-related projects during the fall 2023 and spring 2024 semesters that paved the way for feedback to help develop the VolPark app.

“The previous way you could get information about parking was just a website link, and a lot of people said that they never even opened it,” said ISE senior Caroline Czarnecki. “The majority of the information they got about parking and transportation was through mass emails that nobody ever read, so we wanted to come up with a way to make information more accessible to everybody.”

User-Friendly Information

The VolPark app can be used anonymously and generates a random unique ID that is used to identify a specific phone to allow the crowd-sourcing artificial intelligence to work. The app does not have access to any private information about the user even if a profile is created. Students using the app can select their permit type when creating a profile to display only the parking areas where their permit is valid. The app can also warn students if they are trying to park in an area where their permit is not valid.

The app has the potential to reduce parking search time from an hour to around 10 minutes during peak times on campus.

Srinayana Patil was the only computer science major on the parking project team. The senior used her skills to develop an Android Studio version of the app that users could interact with, and created an interactive prototype for the final design that was similar to the VolPark app.

“One major takeaway was that product development is iterative,” Patil said. “For example, we initially thought a friend recommendation system would be key, but later realized it didn’t fit the overall product vision after reviewing user feedback. I learned the importance of adapting and incorporating feedback for a successful product.”

The Heath IBEP teams interviewed hundreds of students from more than 40 majors to get their input about parking at UT. They also did multiple cost benefit analyses, including the use of cameras to track cars arriving and leaving rather than metal plates.

“One thing I do appreciate about the new app is that the crowdsourcing concept allows students to really feel involved,” Moore said. “I know sometimes as a student, that after you pay your money, you feel like they stop caring about you when it comes to things like housing and parking. But I think we’re taking strides in being a more connected college and community as a whole.”

Rewarding Failures

Null wanted each team to work as fast as possible on their projects to have what they developed tested by the customer and gain more feedback.

“I hope they fail, and I hope they fail fast, because then they can continue to iterate and prototype off of that, and they don’t get too attached to the prototype itself,” Null said. “Because once you take the whole semester and you get attached to something, and then it doesn’t work, it’s hard to bounce back from that.”

The failures forced the students to quicky pivot and try to improve the outcomes. Through the evolution of their projects, they saw how valuable it was to learn from failed attempts and how much more successful the outcome was in the end.

The most gratifying aspect of the parking projects for the Heath IBEP students has been seeing their work used on a daily basis for a problem that was so widespread.

“The majority of the app, when I open it up, it’s like, ‘wow, this looks pretty much exactly like how we suggested it should,’” Czarnecki said. “It was really rewarding, because I saw a lot of the things that I created and a lot of things that my teammates created implemented into the app. We actually made an impact that will help make a part of campus more efficient and will be around for a while.”

Contact

Rhiannon Potkey (865-974-0683, rpotkey@utk.edu)