ParkPulse: A Kotlin-Based Mobile Application for Real-Time Smart Parking Discovery and Management

This paper presented ParkPulse, a Kotlin-based Android application for real-time smart parking discovery, reservation, and navigation. By combining a reactive MVVM client architecture with a Firebase-backed real-time data layer, ParkPulse delivers live occupancy information and a streamlined reservation workflow while remaining lightweight and easy to deploy. A three-week field evaluation with 42 participants showed a 51.6–55.9% reduction in time-to-park and a 73.1% relative increase in overall user satisfaction compared to manual search, with a low reservation-conflict rate of 0.8%. Future work includes integrating low-cost IoT occupancy sensors to reduce reliance on crowd-sourced or manually reported data, extending the platform to iOS via Kotlin Multiplatform to share business logic across native clients, incorporating machine-learning-based demand prediction to proactively suggest facilities, and conducting a larger-scale field study across multiple real urban parking zones.

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