Design of a Rectangular Parking Lot Using a Cutting-Stock Formulation

Abstract

Ever-increasing number of vehicles on the roads and in need of parking facilities at a site creates a constant burden for drivers trying to find a parking space and obstructs maneuvering both in parking areas and also along the roadways on which cars are, sometimes arbitrarily, parked. These problems are aggravated for sites built long time ago when demand for parking used to be much less than it is now. The available space may be limited because of the buildings, green areas, etc., surrounding the parking spaces and the site, and construction of a multi-story garage may not be an option in some cases due to regulations and/or financial reasons. We use a cutting-stock formulation to redesign parking lots that are rectangular in shape but with various dimensions in order to maximize the number of parking stalls. Spreadsheets are used to facilitate pattern generation and Excel Solver add-in is used to solve the optimization model for a set of selected parking lots at a university campus and we obtained improvements up to 22% more parking stalls per lot