Digital Twinning Mechanism and Building Information Modeling for a Smart Parking Management System

Parking space shortages are attributed to an increased density of vehicle presence in the urban context, necessitating the implementation of effective parking management strategies, especially in areas where facility expansion is constrained by limited land availability. Many parking facilities remain operationally inefficient and underutilized due to manual VP methods and having little access to parking resource utilization data. This study develops a DT-based SPMS integrating machine vision, data modeling, and DT technology to automate facility management operations. The system uses YOLOv7 for vehicle and License Plate Detection (LPD), and Deep Text Recognition–Scene Text Recognition (DTR-STR) for license plate recognition (LPR). The findings indicate an 89.89% accuracy for VP- and LPR-based occupancy tracking tasks, and 94.86% for vehicle detection or VD-based occupancy tracking. The system in the built environment comprises three features: (1) automated VP at parking entry and exit points, (2) occupancy monitoring through LPR, (3) Object Detection (OD) for occupancy tracking. The 3D BIM DT model in Autodesk Revit processes inference data from machine vision models to visualize parking activity.