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Monday , 25 March 2024

ITS opportunities in Indian Market

Parking Management is one more area of opportunity under the Smart Cities initiative. Effectively managing the available parking area through parking information dissemination can contribute to better utilization of the available space. This involves identifying the available parking slots using various sensors such as inductive loops, camera, magnetic, ultrasound etc. and make the information available to drivers seeking for parking slots, through Variable Message Signs (VMS) and/or Mobile Apps. The requirement is equally demanding for off-street and on-street parking.

Like the Smart City initiative, the Safe City projects also are opening up the Indian market for ITS suppliers. The Safe City projects were launched with the objective of strengthening safety and security of women in public places. Major component of Safe City Project is setting an Integrated Smart Control Room and setting out-posts exclusively administered by Women police for facilitating ease of filing complaint by women. The Pink Patrol under the safe city project use vehicle tracking system for effective dispatch of enforcement. Implementing safety measures includes improving street lighting in identified crime hotspot areas and, implementing cameras in buses.

In the first phase, eight selected metropolitan cities, namely, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Lucknow will be implementing safe city projects. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has mandated installation of vehicle location tracking device and emergency button for new public service vehicle registered after January 1, 2019. Similarly, the Kerala Motor Vehicles Department is mandating to fix Automatic Vehicle Locating (AVL) system with one or more emergency buttons in all public vehicles under the project Suraksha- Mitr as a measure of improving public safety. The system can report violations including over speeding. The Emergency Response Support System (ERSS) is an integration of police (100), fire (101), health (108) and women (1090) helpline numbers to provide emergency services through the single number ‘112’. Country wide rollout of the ERSS is nearing completion. ERSS also use various ITS components including vehicle tracking system.

ITS is used in highways for toll collection, incident detection, speed detection, automatic counting and classification etc. Most of the toll plazas across national and state highways are using RFID based FASTag for toll collection. FASTag is a simple to use, reloadable tag which enables automatic deduction of toll charges at the toll plaza without stopping for the cash transaction. The tag affixed on the windscreen of the vehicle will be read by the RFID reader at the toll plaza and the transaction will happen automatically while the vehicle pass through the toll gate.

Dr. P Ravikumar
Ph.D (IIT Bombay),
Senior Consultant,
C-DAC Thiruvananthapuram

Weighing in Motion (WIM) is another technology the authorities are seriously considering to adopt for the highways. WIM are designed to capture and record the axle weights and gross vehicle weights as vehicles drive over a measurement site. Implementation of WIM will make the inspection process easier and fast. Similarly, BRTS systems that are coming up in many cities offer opportunity for various gadgets including Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) system, Ticketing Machines, Gate Control, VMS, Traffic Signal Controllers having Transit Signal Priority (TSP) features, etc.

The most interesting thing about implementation of ITS solutions is the way these influence the business models. It can be observed that the ITS is changing from a conventional technology driven system into a data-driven intelligent transportation system. Infrastructure-generated data is quickly being replaced by sensorgenerated data. The data collected from a variety of sources can be processed into various forms for transportation operation and planning. For example, the vehicle locating systems were implemented in public and private vehicles initially to understand their current location for monitoring and managing purpose. This data now can be processed for generating congestion maps and speed graphs on various city roads. The data generated by the Electronic Ticketing Machine (ETM) is used to generate passenger load information and decision support tools use them for effective scheduling.

Classified vehicle count at state and national highways can provide an insight to the revenue generation at toll plazas for cross reference. Insurance companies can look at the driving pattern of various drivers and the speeds from the GPS data. ANPR can be effectively used for crime tracking. Huge data is collected every hour by the hundreds and thousands of surveillance cameras installed across various cities. Different information can be extracted from these videos using appropriate analytics. Need for the Road Accident Data Management System (RADMS) is being discussed for long time. Field proven indigenous RADMS is yet to come. It is a long way for our country for this migration; but, the opportunities are huge.

 

 

 

 

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