Subset Parking Functions

Abstract

A parking function $(c_1,\ldots,c_n)$ can be viewed as having $n$ cars trying to park on a one-way street with $n$ parking spots, where car $i$ tries to park in spot $c_i$, and otherwise he parks in the leftmost available spot after $c_i$. Another way to view this is that each car has a set $C_i$ of "acceptable" parking spots, namely $C_i=[c_i,n]$, and that each car tries to park in the leftmost available spot that they find acceptable. Motivated by this, we define a subset parking function $(C_1,\ldots,C_n)$, with each $C_i$ a subset of $\{1,\ldots,n\}$, by having the $i$th car try to park in the leftmost available element of $C_i$. We further generalize this idea by restricting our sets to be of size $k$, intervals, and intervals of length $k$. In each of these cases we provide formulas for the number of such parking functions.