ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,272,242, issued on April 8, was assigned to Honda Motor Co. Ltd. (Tokyo) and University of Central Florida Research Foundation Inc. (Orlando, Fla.).

"Systems and methods for use in determining parking spot allocation" was invented by Danyang Tian (Ann Arbor, Mich.), Ehsan Moradi Pari (Ann Arbor, Mich.), Xue Bai (Novi, Mich.), Yaser Pourmohammadi Fallah (Oviedo, Fla.), Ghayoor Shah (Orlando, Fla.) and Shahriar Shahram (Orlando, Fla.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A system for use in determining parking spot allocation. The system includes a host vehicle parked in a host parking spot. The host vehicle includes a transceiver configured for ...