Electronic Toll Collection Research Articles

Way to go! High-tech roads [road networks

In Europe, much of the built environment is historical and difficult to alter, but in the United States, where the historical record is much shorter, the scope for evolution is greater. No part of the built environment illustrates this better than the interstate transport infrastructure. It has evolved from jalopies and graded roadbeds to electric hybrids and electronic toll collection. Wherever we live, we tend to take roads for granted, until they are closed by accidents or restricted by roadworks. It is no secret that the US is defined by its road network: viewed from space at night, the nation resembles a classical topological network of nodes and links, formed by the cities and freeways. On closer inspection, the links are, in fact, chains of smaller nodes joined together by the interstate road network.

MICROSTRIP CIRCULAR PATCH ARRAY ANTENNA FOR ELECTRONIC TOLL COLLECTION

Electronic toll collection will reduce the wastage of time at toll gates and collects the money in fast manner. At toll collection stations on the highway, the automatic toll collection will collect the money using one sensing antenna and the signal processing unit with the help of computer interfacing. The technology will reduce the man power usage, time and cost with customer friendly environment. The present paper deals with the design and analysis of electronic toll collection antenna operating at 5.8 GHz with moderate gain and bandwidth. An array of 6X6 elements patch antenna is used in this design, which increased the gain considerably for the desired operation.

Balanced Scorecard and IPA Enables Public Service in Township Management: Local Government Performance

Quality of township management is highly related to society, and it reflects the local government situation. However, past research seldom discusses the balanced 
 scorecard and Importance-performance analysis concepts of townships management, which is a driving factor in the enhancement enterprises and local government performance. This paper proposes the concepts of balanced scored to combine the analysis and integration of township resident surveys for Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) implementation. The implication of the existing perspective on management concept is that performance evaluation systems emerging in profit and non-profit enterprises are going to meet the needs of local governments in terms of townships that citizens’ satisfaction in Taiwan.

Effects of ETC Service Failure and Recovery Strategies on Freeway Drivers’ Satisfaction

In Taiwan, a distance-based electronic toll collection (ETC) system will be implemented to replace the manual collection of freeway tolls at tollbooths. For improving the service satisfaction and increasing the usage rate of the ETC, this study discusses the effects of service recovery after ETC service failure on drivers’ satisfaction and usage intention. The critical incident technique (CIT) is applied to explore incidents of service failure and service recovery in relation to ETC. Statistical methods are used to discuss the intentions and preferences of drivers for service recovery via scenarios. A survey conducted using a questionnaire designed through the stated preference approach is utilized to investigate Western Taiwan freeway corridor users. The analytical results should assist the responsible managerial and operational agencies to develop better marketing strategies enhancing the usage rate of the ETC system.

Applications and Opportunities for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technology in Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Case Study

RFID technology has been known to be one of the noteworthy converging technologies of the 20th century. The technology can be applied in many fields. However, this paper focuses on the application of the technology in the transportation industry. The application of RFID in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) is gaining popularity with its widespread use in the field of toll management and the management of the overall transport sector. There are many RFID applications available in the market such as RFID contactless smart card commonly used in buses and LRTs, Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI), Electronic Toll Collection (ETC), Smart Parking, and congestion zone pricing. In Mashhad, the second largest city of Iran, the My Card is used not only in Public transit but also in car parking, and soon in taxis and also other public municipality Services. Driven by such success stories, deployment of RFID technology in Mashhad is thus encouraged. This work has been carried out with a purpose to demonstrate benefits of the RFID technology in developing countries and its application in transport sector. This paper explores existing technology and surveys a set of successful implementations in Mashhad for Intelligent transportation applications .The integration considerations and challenges facing RFID deployment are also discussed.

A Novel Parallel-Series Feeding Network Based on Three-Way Power Divider for Microstrip Antenna Array

A novel parallel-series feeding network for microstrip antenna arrays has been presented. A three-way power divider is utilized to connect the subarrays with the series-fed transmission lines. The proposed power divider is composed of seven transmission lines with different characteristic impedances and two isolation resistors. By changing the characteristic impedance of the transmission lines, the power division ratio can be adjusted. Meanwhile, good match and reasonable isolation performance can be obtained simultaneously. The proposed approach has been verified experimentally by using a 20-unit road side unit (RSU) antenna array operating at 5.815 GHz frequency range for a electronic toll collection (ETC) system. The proposed feeding network can be simply implemented on a single-layer substrate.

Multiregime Adaptive Signal Control for Congested Urban Roadway Networks

A hierarchical adaptive signal control was developed and implemented in New York City to manage congestion in a complex urban roadway environment. Control strategies, including strategically regulating traffic demand and balancing the queue–storage ratio at critical intersections, work in concert to systematically alleviate congestion and improve mobility. The high usage of electronic toll collection tags in this area allows large amounts of per trip travel time data to be collected (nearly 1 million per trip travel time records daily) and used in real time for effective control. Congestion levels are mapped to different control regimes. Various demand-regulating strategies are applied at the peripheral roadways of the target control zone. These strategies proactively employ signal offsets and splits to exert a tapering and rebalancing effect on the traffic. Demand regulation results in a better use of available network storage spaces while preserving the capacity of the target control zone. Inside the target control area, a dynamic queue-balancing strategy is implemented at selected critical intersections to prevent propagation of spillovers with stabilized or diminished queues. The initial implementation covered 110 intersections in the highly congested central business district of midtown Manhattan New York City. Results to date are summarized.

Multiregime Adaptive Signal Control for Congested Urban Roadway Networks

A hierarchical adaptive signal control was developed and implemented in New York City to manage congestion in a complex urban roadway environment. Control strategies, including strategically regulating traffic demand and balancing the queue–storage ratio at critical intersections, work in concert to systematically alleviate congestion and improve mobility. The high usage of electronic toll collection tags in this area allows large amounts of per trip travel time data to be collected (nearly 1 million per trip travel time records daily) and used in real time for effective control. Congestion levels are mapped to different control regimes. Various demand-regulating strategies are applied at the peripheral roadways of the target control zone. These strategies proactively employ signal offsets and splits to exert a tapering and rebalancing effect on the traffic. Demand regulation results in a better use of available network storage spaces while preserving the capacity of the target control zone. Inside the target control area, a dynamic queue-balancing strategy is implemented at selected critical intersections to prevent propagation of spillovers with stabilized or diminished queues. The initial implementation covered 110 intersections in the highly congested central business district of midtown Manhattan New York City. Results to date are summarized.

Freeway drivers’ willingness to pay for an on board unit under an electronic toll collection system

Electronic toll collection (ETC) systems have been put into practice in one or two channels at toll plazas on Taiwan’s freeways since 2006. The utilisation of the ETC system has been flat due to the extra cost of installing the on board unit (OBU) that is used in the system. To increase the utilisation rate of the ETC system, it is crucial to understand the real price that drivers are willing to pay. Therefore, this study investigates freeway drivers’ willingness to pay a value for an OBU. A stated preference experiment is designed to obtain the willingness to pay at three different levels of use. To avoid the estimation bias due to a large percentage with a zero willingness to pay, a spike model is used. Different markets are segmented to examine their willingness to pay for an OBU. The estimation results show that the willingness to pay for an OBU is NT$727/unit1Note: 30.04NT$ was equivalent to $1 USD (October, 2011).1 for short distance drivers, NT$830 for medium distance drivers, and NT$1308/unit for long distance drivers.

The Design of Contactless IC Card Reader in ETC

The device has the 13.56MHz radio frequency identification (RFID) reader feature, and it can be used in the reading and writing in the aspect with purchase secure access module (PSAM) card, embedded secure access module (ESAM) card and dual-interface user card in the Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) industry. This article focuses on the design of the antenna and external matching circuit of the contactless IC card reader, lists software architecture and communication process, and obtains the optimum matching circuit through analyzing the data got from Agilent vector network analyzer

Research on a Map-matching Method for a GNSS-based ETC System

AbstractThis paper describes a new definition of a map on the on-board unit (OBU) side as well as a new map-matching method for a global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) system. Key points and links are defined on a new map according to the highway design of an urban area in China in order to meet the needs of the GNSS-based ETC system. A new map-matching algorithm is proposed based on this map definition. The GPS search area changes with the running speed of the vehicle during the map-matching process. The proposed method first matches GPS data to the key nodes on the map instead of using links. Next, it matches the key exit, entry and passing links according to the charging status. Finally, it identifies the links by link property and adjacency relation to avoid interference from nearby vehicles. At the end of the paper, the performance of the proposed system in the experiment is evaluated, and other methods to improve the accuracy of map-matching are discussed.

고속도로 영업소의 자동 요금 징수 시스템 도입에 따른 소형 경유 화물트럭의 배출가스 저감 효과 분석

Electronic Toll Collection System (ETCS), so called "Hi-Pass" in Korea, has improved traffic flow at toll gate of highways. It is known that the improvement of traffic flow should reduce air pollutants and <TEX>$CO_2$</TEX> from vehicles. In this study, real driving emission of a light duty truck with Portable Emission Measurement System(PEMS) has been measured to evaluate the emission reduction effect due to ETCS. The correlations between driving variables and emissions have been analyzed to verify its effect on traffic flow improvement and emission reduction at toll gate. We considered average vehicle speed, Relative Positive Acceleration (RPA), and the distance of queue as driving variables. Compared to passing Manual Toll Collection System (MTCS) lane without queue, ETCS was able to reduce 38.7% of <TEX>$NO_x$</TEX>, 21.6% of soot, and 27.7% of <TEX>$CO_2$</TEX>. The results showed that the higher the average vehicle speed, the lower RPA and no queue in ETCS contributed to the emission reductions. Linear equation models with RPA and queue have been established by the multiple linear regression method. The linear models resulted in the higher coefficient of determination than those with only average vehicle speed used for establishing vehicle emission factors.

The adoption behaviours of freeway electronic toll collection: A latent class modelling approach

This study develops an electronic toll collection (ETC) disaggregate choice model based on a large-scale questionnaire survey of car drivers in Taiwan. To acknowledge the difference in preferences among car drivers, the latent class logit model is used to classify respondents into different groups without subjective segmentation. The estimation results show that six groups of car drivers are optimally distinguished. The price of an e-pass and the discount for ETC tolls are identified as the two most important factors affecting ETC adoption. The study also finds that significant differences in adoption behaviours exist among groups. Effective marketing strategies for different groups are then proposed accordingly.

Identifying important variables for predicting travel time of freeway with non-recurrent congestion with neural networks

The provision of long-distance travel time information has been a major factor facilitating the intelligent transportation system to become more successful. Previous studies have pointed out that non-recurrent congestion is the major cause of freeway delay. The long travel distance complicates the characteristics of traffic flow. Hence, how to improve the prediction capability of long-distance travel time in the case of non-recurrent congestion is an important issue that must be overcome in the field of travel time prediction. This study constructs the travel time prediction model for a segment of 36.1 kms (including eight interchanges) in the National Freeway No. 1, Taiwan, by using the multilayer perceptron. To improve the prediction capability of the model in the case of non-recurrent congestion, this study collects data of average spot speed and heavy vehicle volume gathered by dual-loop vehicle detectors, in addition to rainfall and temporal feature. Furthermore, the historical travel time inferred from the original data of electronic toll collection (ETC) system is also used as the input variable, and the actual travel time inferred from ETC is used as the training target to establish a robust prediction model. As suggested by the results of 168 experimental combinations, the most appropriate prediction model established in this study is a highly accurate forecasting model with MAPE of 6.47 %.

Embracing the new takes its toll

PurposeThe aim is to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.Design/methodology/approachThe briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.FindingsWith hundreds of millions of vehicle journeys along the super highway in Taiwan, collecting tolls manually seemed an outdated process, delaying drivers who had to stop and queue at payment booths and requiring the hiring of a considerable number of employees to collect the money. So it seemed common sense for the government to contract a private company to develop and operate an electronic toll collection system which would detect by infra‐red rays a device within the vehicle, automatically deducting the charge from a pre‐paid card that drivers could buy at service stations. Drivers would incur the initial cost of buying and installing the onboard unit and buying their value‐storage card but had the benefit of never again having to stop and wait at tollgates or having to have small change handy.Practical implicationsThe article provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.Social implicationsThe article provides strategic insights and practical thinking that can have a broader social impact.Originality/valueThe briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

Development of CO2 Emission Estimating Methodology of Electronic Toll Collection System Based on Instantaneous Speed and Acceleration

Development of CO2 Emission Estimating Methodology of Electronic Toll Collection System Based on Instantaneous Speed and Acceleration

Analysis and Design of the Electronic Toll Collection System of Expressway Based on RFID

In order to speed up the vehicles through the expressway toll station and reduce traffic congestion, we analysed of the No-waiting ETC(Electronic Toll Collection System) of expressway unifying the ETC theory and the RFID(Radio Frequency Identification Devices) technology. Firstly, we analysed system's hierarchy architecture, then detailed analysed the basic component of system, and designed the workflow and composing of functional modules, finally, established the model of ETC system of expressway based on RFID, it provides more practical guidance scheme for expressway ETC system.

ETC Assisted Traffic Light Control Scheme for Reducing Vehicles CO2 Emissions

This paper presents a vehicle’s CO 2 emission reduction scheme by an ETC-assisted real-time traffic light control scheme in vehicular networks. Using Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) devices, real-time road conditions can be obtained by wireless communication between the ETC devices and the traffic lights. A decision tree classification algorithm is used to assign the changing policy for the traffic lights, and then the optimal average waiting time can be calculated. Less waiting time will result in less fuel consumption and fewer CO 2 emissions. Compared with the most widely used fixed time control, the ETC-assisted realtime traffic light control scheme has much better performances in reducing the average waiting time, improving non-stop passing rate, and reducing CO 2 emission.

ETC Assisted Traffic Light Control Scheme for Reducing Vehicles' CO2 Emissions

This paper presents a vehicle’s CO2 emission reduction scheme by an ETC-assisted real-time traffic light control scheme in vehicular networks. Using Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) devices, real-time road conditions can be obtained by wireless communication between the ETC devices and the traffic lights. A decision tree classification algorithm is used to assign the changing policy for the traffic lights, and then the optimal average waiting time can be calculated. Less waiting time will result in less fuel consumption and fewer CO2 emissions. Compared with the most widely used fixed time control, the ETC-assisted realtime traffic light control scheme has much better performances in reducing the average waiting time, improving non-stop passing rate, and reducing CO2 emission.

Development of a Model for Electronic Toll-Collection System

The paper presents a new method for electronic toll collection system and to match car number plate detection system. The electronic toll collection system (ETS) has been fabricated based on microcontroller. Here a system is developed to collect tolls according to the weight of the vehicle. The car number plate detection method utilizes template matching technique to approximate the location of car number plate. Then, using this output from the template matching method, color information is used to eliminate the unwanted color areas from the approximate number plate region without affecting the correct color regions. Hence, the number plate region can be determined more accurately. This work can easily be done by image processing system using MATLAB. The method has low complexity and reduced the processing time magnificently. This automated system also shows a better performance in highway traffic management. This paper shows the gateway to fabricate a highly automated toll-plaza. The purpose of this paper is to collect toll according to the weight of the vehicles and to build a real time application which recognizes license plates from cars at a gate, for example at the entrance of a parking area. The system, based on regular PC with video camera, catches video frames which include a visible car license plate and processes them. Once a license plate is detected, its digits are recognized, displayed on the User Interface or checked against a database. The focus is on the design of algorithms used for extracting the license plate from a single image, isolating the characters of the plate and identifying the individual characters. Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) is a technology that allows for electronic payment of tolls. The endeavor of our work was to develop a highly automated toll-collection system. The automated system classifies (1) a vehicle based on its load range. In recent world, while collecting tolls in the bridges/ tunnels there may arise various problems such as: lengthy process for money transactions, which leads long traffic congestion as well. Here in Bangladesh the toll collection system is not developed. Moreover, it is time consuming and not accurate. The overloaded vehicles give the same amount of toll like the unloaded one though the overloaded vehicles damage the bridge more than that of the unloaded one. In some cases the vehicles carry a huge amount of load which crosses the legal limit. Moreover, corruption is also a major problem here. This is why; such a toll collection system is fabricated here. This toll-collection system is designed for achieving a fraud free and completely auditable operation by accurately detecting and registering vehicle movements and toll collector's activities. A central control system is introduced here for online monitoring of the tool-plaza. A pressure sensor is used to measure the weight of the vehicles which gives analogous data to the microcontroller. The microcontroller takes the data from the pressure sensor and gives the output data as a unit of currency. A system is also introduced here to control the barricade with the micro controller (2). Whenever the load of the vehicle is measured then the toll is collected and then the barricade is opened. It just takes a few moments and by doing this a better traffic management is also confirmed as well as the accurate measurement of the load of the vehicle. The objectives of image processing based electronic toll collection are many. It gives an accurate data as well as saves the license plate of the vehicles to recognize any unwanted vehicle.