Inspiration

Nowadays, it is extremely tedious to find a carpark lot. Remember Mr. Bean? Even if you manage to reach a carpark, you may not find a parking lot. So our team comes up with an effective solution to make car-parking and our life easier!

What it does

As users enter a location, the CarPark HDB Chatbot provides information about locations of each HDB carpark nearby, number of available parking lots, and also display each carpark in google map. The Chatbot also store information about a user's recent searches (maximum 3) to help those who can not remember their previous location.

How we built it

First, we crawled data about HDB parking lots from https://data.gov.sg/dataset/hdb-carpark-information and built our own database using SQLite. Also, using the API from https://data.gov.sg/dataset/carpark-availability, we manage to create a complete database about available HDB parking lots.

Subsequently, by using Telepot and Selenium API, we receive users' input and then search for carparks having matched address. The bot will return to users real-time carpark information along with the number of available parking lots and its location on the Google map.

Challenges we ran into

It is difficult to do efficient searching for available carparks. Hence, we come up with algorithms to have an efficient searching for carparks and remove redundant or irrelevant search results.