There is something curious about the car parks at Northshore Residences I and II in Punggol. Unlike a typical HDB car park, the entrances and exits are free of gantry barriers. Instead, cameras register vehicle licence plates to mark the start and end of parking sessions. Prominent green or amber light indicators above every parking lot help motorists to spot an available one immediately.

All that remains is for them to simply park, and go. This is Parking@HDB, HDB’s new generation smart parking system.

A Digital Transformation

Smart parking was conceived out of a desire to reimagine new and better ways of working, to improve the HDB living experience. Leading the smart parking initiative is HDB’s Electronic Parking and Solutions team, which includes team members Joyce Ke, Tay Lay Peng and Amanda Chua.

With over 1,900 HDB car parks implemented with the Electronic Parking System (EPS) under their management, the team has the heavy responsibility of ensuring that EPS equipment are working at all times, and car park operations are running smoothly for motorists.

With exciting advances in technology, they seized the opportunity to develop an ideal parking system that is automated from end-to-end and would allow real-time monitoring. “We began exploring technologies such as Licence Plate Recognition and video analytics that could help us automate not only the operational processes for our team, but also the parking processes to improve the parking experience for our residents,” Joyce explains. “We can also tap on data precision to regulate the demand and supply of visitor and reserved lots, opening up the possibility of dynamic lot allocation.”

Breaking New Ground

The challenge then, was turning the idea into reality.

Lay Peng recalls one of the hurdles that surfaced at the beginning: “The cameras read the letter ‘B’ as the number ‘8’ and raindrops as the number ‘1’ instead. To overcome this, we added another system to cross-check the captured vehicle licence plate and IU number with the Land Transport Authority’s (LTA) vehicle database, to ensure that we start the parking session for the correct vehicle.”

The team was also not equipped with the relevant technical expertise. “I am a scientist by training, Amanda is an economist, and Lay Peng specialises in a different Information Technology field,” shares Joyce. “We had to learn everything from scratch, including developing the front-end and back-end software.”

Still, they persevered. In less than a year, they successfully developed the basic features of the smart parking system, and it was ready for its trial at the Punggol Northshore district. “It was hard work, but I am glad we pulled through it together,” says Amanda.

Smart HDB Living

Smart parking is just one of the ways HDB has made daily living more convenient and comfortable for residents of Punggol Northshore, Singapore’s first smart and sustainable district.

Within and beyond the flat, HDB has implemented smart initiatives to bring about a more liveable, efficient, sustainable and safe living environment. For example, flats are fitted with smart distribution boards and sockets to support the adoption of smart home solutions and applications more easily, and sensors around the estate help monitor and issue alerts when common amenities require maintenance.

“Jams caused by gantry barriers, activating parking sessions manually, illegal parking, or visitors taking up residents’ parking lots – with smart parking, these will all be a thing of the past,” says Joyce. “This is the crux of the Parking@HDB smart parking system – to provide a seamless and more pleasant living experience and environment for residents.”