In the era of the industrial internet, new requirements for building urban parking platforms!

As digitalization deepens, the mobile internet is shifting from the consumer‑oriented internet to the industrial internet. While the evolution of the internet has dramatically enhanced consumers’ experiences, many traditional enterprises still rely on relatively conventional and outdated processes across their internal production and manufacturing operations. The industrial internet represents a further advancement in this evolutionary trajectory, leveraging next‑generation information technologies—such as the internet, mobile internet, the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence—and employing connectivity, interaction, and computation as its three core pillars. It permeates every stage of enterprise and institutional production and manufacturing, helping traditional firms address inefficiencies, drive comprehensive upgrades across entire industries, and foster cross‑sectoral collaboration.

From the perspective of the industrial internet, urban parking aims to establish a smart city‑wide parking platform that leverages the internet, the Internet of Things, and other advanced technologies to achieve comprehensive connectivity and aggregation of all on‑street and off‑street parking resources within the city. At the same time, it enables bidirectional interaction with diverse user groups: providing parking services to motorists, offering government agencies tools for parking regulation, and furnishing businesses with efficient solutions for parking operations and management. Furthermore, the urban parking platform must foster cross‑industry collaboration with smart city initiatives, dynamic traffic systems, smart governance, smart tourism, and other sectors. Consequently, from the vantage point of the industrial internet, the urban parking platform plays an indispensable and pivotal role.

However, according to our research, many city‑level parking platform users hold misconceptions about these systems. Some view them merely as tools for handling routine parking fee collection and management; others see them as ancillary management software that vendors should provide free of charge when purchasing hardware; still others have been misled by market‑driven buzzwords like “artificial intelligence” and “big data platforms.” All of these perceptions are incorrect. In the era of the industrial internet, what kind of urban parking platform do we really need? To build a truly city‑scale parking platform, we must address both the business and technical dimensions, articulating four key requirements.

First, from a business perspective, the development of an urban parking platform should be structured along distinct lines, organized into hierarchical levels, allocated across departments, and implemented in phased stages.

I. By Lineage Yiche was among the first in the industry to propose integrating on‑street and off‑street parking services with charging operations, and it is one of the very few domestic companies that truly possesses experience managing all three business lines. In its early days, the company also attempted to consolidate all parking‑related services onto a single platform for unified management—but quickly realized this approach was flawed. We found that on‑street parking, parking lots, and EV charging stations are typically overseen by separate administrative bodies. From an operational standpoint, each segment functions independently; forcibly merging them into one centralized platform may create the illusion of a comprehensive solution, but in practice, it adds little value.

II. Hierarchical Structure For a city‑level parking platform, the user base is certainly diverse: it may include frontline parking attendants as well as senior management. Their priorities differ—frontline staff are likely focused on parking fee collection, while senior leaders are more concerned with the overall city‑wide parking resource utilization and allocation. Therefore, the platform must provide tailored management interfaces for users at different organizational levels.

III. By Department Parking is a resource with semi‑public‑good characteristics: on the one hand, businesses must manage and operate parking facilities, while on the other, they remain subject to government oversight. For a company’s operations and management team, the platforms they rely on differ from those used by regulatory authorities. Businesses typically focus on generating revenue and improving operational efficiency, whereas government agencies prioritize whether parking practices are standardized and whether enforcement and fee collection comply with regulations—thus, their perspectives diverge. A city‑level parking platform must balance the needs of both operating entities and government regulators, offering distinct management interfaces tailored to each stakeholder group.

IV. Phased Approach Each city has its own stage of development and scale. When a city is still in its early stages, our focus is on helping it address fee‑collection challenges and fostering sound charging practices across the urban landscape. As a city builds up management expertise and establishes a solid foundation for fee administration, our priority shifts to enhancing both parking‑fee collection and overall management, with an emphasis on achieving more refined, data‑driven operations. Later, once a city has amassed substantial parking‑data assets, we can leverage that data to support property owners in unlocking value through big‑data analytics and implementing data‑driven operational strategies.

In summary, In light of the four points above, we put forward two core arguments. 1. The urban parking platform must achieve “decentralized management, unified data.” Specifically, it should provide distinct management interfaces tailored to different business functions, organizational levels, and departments, while ensuring that all data ultimately undergoes unified interaction and processing on the platform—this is the essence of integrated urban parking resource management. 2. We must design platforms that align with the specific stage of development of parking systems in each city, avoiding the pitfalls of blindly adopting generic fee‑collection platforms or prematurely building overly complex systems. With this goal in mind, based on years of experience in urban parking projects and a deep understanding of the sector, Yiche has developed three targeted solutions: Qihang (for the early stages of urban parking development), Chuangxing (for the phase of refined, granular parking management), and Linghang (for the era of big‑data‑driven urban parking applications).

From a technical standpoint, there are four key requirements: the platform must offer broad compatibility, robust data-processing capabilities, advanced big-data analytics tailored to specific scenarios and applications, and high levels of security.

In the era of the industrial internet, when confronted with the parking industry—characterized by fragmented resources and complex use cases—no single advanced device can address every scenario; nor can any enterprise, no matter how powerful, drive the entire sector’s transformation on its own. We must adopt an open mindset, which first requires urban parking platforms to boast robust interoperability: the ability to seamlessly integrate a wide array of in‑street parking management terminals—including geomagnetic sensors, video bollards, overhead cameras, mid‑level cameras, and video patrol vehicles—and to connect with diverse off‑street parking data sources. Only then can city parking managers aggregate all urban parking resources.

Secondly, as urban parking platforms continue to evolve, the number of connected parking resources and users is steadily increasing, leading to an ever-growing volume of data that needs to be processed. This growing demand for robust big‑data processing capabilities will pose significant challenges for these platforms. Yiche has consistently remained at the forefront in this area; its city‑level parking platform leverages a cutting‑edge big‑data processing architecture. At present, Yiche’s independently developed urban parking platform can handle over 1,000 concurrent users and process more than 5 million orders per day, fully meeting the requirements of any city in China.

Furthermore, there is the capability for big‑data analysis and processing. At present, most vendors’ platforms merely offer an aesthetically pleasing interface, but in reality they simply present raw data dumps and rudimentary statistics—far from providing meaningful support to urban parking managers. True big data requires us to start with customer needs: on the basis of a sufficiently large data sample, we must model and analyze all business‑related data, uncover latent patterns, and identify correlations among data points. The resulting insights should then be exposed via standardized APIs to data‑visualization systems, smart‑city service ecosystems, and public‑service platforms, enabling front‑end applications to reach city administrators and citizens alike. Only by leveraging scenario‑driven, application‑oriented big data can we address customers’ real pain points.

Finally, we must also prioritize platform security. A city‑level platform handling parking payments can process daily transaction volumes in the hundreds of thousands, or even exceeding one million; over just a few years, these amounts can accumulate to hundreds of millions. If security is compromised, it could jeopardize the safety of users’ personal information, payment details, and funds. Moreover, parking projects are often government‑led public‑interest initiatives. In today’s highly digital age, any breach—whether resulting in the leakage of user privacy or the compromise of financial assets—will inevitably trigger a wave of citizen complaints, placing immense pressure on the relevant authorities. The Yiche City Parking Platform not only incorporates comprehensive security measures across multiple dimensions—including network security, data protection, application security, and information security—but also assists clients in establishing rigorous, standardized operational protocols, ensuring the platform’s secure operation through both technical safeguards and robust management practices.

In addition, Urban parking projects are ongoing initiatives that, at a macro level, typically encompass at least three phases. : The development process comprises three distinct phases—initial construction focused on intelligent information upgrades, stable operations centered on fee‑based management, and advanced internet‑driven operations leveraging big data for commercial monetization. Each phase requires specialized firms to deliver tailored consulting and services, with seamless integration across the stages. Yet many cities fixate solely on the first phase, treating urban parking projects as mere system‑integration undertakings. They assume that once the system is built and accepted, the project is complete—when in fact, from our perspective, this marks only the beginning of a new chapter. There remains a long road ahead before urban parking can truly be managed effectively.