Armed with the insight of 95% of revenue coming from ETC transactions, our Director, Mr. Nipun Agrawal came up with novel idea and designed the new toll plaza with diagonally stacked lanes without booths. Only 2 extra wide lanes are kept with booths to handle cash trasnactions. The new design enables cost savings of about INR 20 Crore for a 10 lane toll plaza, in Land acquisition, PQC and Building Construction.
Currently we are working on porting our tolling application on the android platform which will help us reduce the hardware footprint on the toll plaza. This system will greatly reduce the required hardware, installation time, and maintenance efforts apart from considerable cost savings.
With increasing ETC revenues, there is a corresponding increase in ETC related disputes and reconcilation of the settlement of ETC revenue. All banks are providing data in different formats and disputes can be stretched as long as 180 days after the transaction, which makes tracking and reconciliation very difficult. This needs a dedicated team and lot of manual work.
AI Image Processing (PIR) System & Innovation – New Ideas
A decade ago, AI was the future. Today, AI is present among us. We at PATH believe in change, we believe in moving ahead with time. Hence, we have already embraced AI and incorporated it into our Toll Management System. If you know Toll Management System, you have to know Auto Vehicle Classification (AVC) Systems. Conventional AVCs were based on Induction loops and Infrared sensors, which were costly, cumbersome to install and difficult to maintain.
Toll management system is the most important part of a Highway Project. This is the system that will enable the toll operating agency to efficiently and securely collect toll from the road user. The system is a complicated mix of more than 13 different hardware equipment integrated with a multi-module software, to automate and keep track of various functions of the toll collection, such as User management, Float management, Toll Collection, Cash declaration, Transaction Audit, Vehicle Classification, ETC FASTag transaction processing, TC performance, and various other features.
At PATH, we understand the importance of data.
At any given point, most of the Highway concessionaires operate multiple projects with multiple toll plazas across the country. PATH also operates about 60+ tolls across India. It is quite a challenge to keep track of the revenue and traffic across all your toll plaza. Further, getting this data at one place and analysis of this data is even more challenging. Even NHAI is also working towards the consolidation of its traffic data across all highways through multiple projects of their own.
We have developed an in house parking management solution to efficiently manage the parking operations. The system works with a timing-based fare structure to allow charging on the Pay as you Use model. The system can keep track of entry & exit of vehicles and display available parking slots information on the console. We are also in process of porting the same application on the android platform, which will reduce the system footprint and provide flexibility in operations.
In today’s fast-changing world, we try to keep ourselves updated and abreast of the latest technologies and platform. We have selected Ubuntu Linux as our Operating system which provides us inherent security and safety against the most common viruses and malware.
For database, we rely on open source MYSQL server and NoSQL databases like Mongo DB etc, which are powerful and capable of managing large amounts of data and supports a variety of applications.
For development, we work primarily with Java, which is supposed to be present on the majority of the world’s systems, be it computers or mobile terminals.
We also work with Java, Java FX, JQuery, JavaScript, Python, JSP, Spring, HTML, CSS, XML, Unix Shell Scripting, etc.