ETC system and its solution in the current road network toll application
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In recent years, the country’s large-scale investment in transportation infrastructure has promoted the rapid development of my country’s highway industry. By the end of 2002, the mileage of expressways in my country had exceeded 20,000 kilometers. Due to the complexity of the investment subject during the construction period, after the completion of the project, the “one way, one company” operation and management model has led to too many main line toll stations. When the existing toll system cannot meet the needs of increasing traffic, the main line toll stations, especially in Traffic bottlenecks are formed at the city entrance and exit toll stations, which seriously affects the performance of the road network, resulting in waste of resources and environmental pollution. Based on the existing road toll collection and station facilities, and based on the distribution characteristics of the expressway entrance and exit traffic flow, the use of non-stop toll technology to solve the traffic bottleneck problem of toll stations in the road network from the level of plan design has also become a traffic engineering research. New topic.
1 The working principle of the ETC system
1.1 Hierarchical composition of ETC system
There are currently three ways to charge roads and bridges in my country. (1) Purely manual charging method, that is, all charging procedures are completed by manual operation. Due to the large workload and difficulty of statistics and supervision, this method has basically not been adopted. (2) Manual semi-automatic charging, that is, “manual charging, computer management, closed-circuit television monitoring” method. This method is suitable for the current situation of highway management in my country and is the main method of road and bridge toll collection. However, for toll stations with large traffic volume, this method cannot solve the traffic bottleneck problem. (3) Electronic non-stop charging method, namely ETC system charging. This method uses the vehicle automatic identification technology, realizes the data exchange between the lane controller and the on-board electronic tag through the antenna, and automatically completes the toll collection procedure. The hierarchical structure is shown in Figure 1.
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1.2 The workflow of the ETC system
The complete ETC system can be divided into (part: one part is the ETC front-end lane system; the other part is the ETC back-end clearing system.
1.2.1 ETC Lane System
The ETC lane system includes a vehicle detection subsystem, a traffic command subsystem, and a vehicle image capture subsystem. The vehicle identification subsystem is usually composed of electronic tags, lane antennas, antenna controllers, and computer systems. The structure principle of ETC lane system is shown in Figure 2.
When the ETC user vehicle enters the read-write range of the lane antenna, the antenna controller receives the communication request from the lane controller to form a data frame that conforms to a certain communication protocol, and sends the data frame to the on-board electronic tag through the lane antenna, and receives and analyzes it at the same time For the data returned from the electronic tag, the lane controller issues relevant instructions based on the received information to complete the read and write operations on the electronic tag, and store the result of the operation. This process includes operations such as confirming the validity of the electronic tag, identifying the vehicle type, querying the fee table, and deducting the fee. If the passing vehicle is an illegal ETC user, the image capture subsystem and traffic control subsystem will be activated to capture, alarm, intercept and other operations on the offending vehicle for exception handling. The vehicle detection subsystem is mainly used to automatically isolate objects when a continuous flow of traffic passes through to ensure the correct operation of the system for each user.
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2.2.2 Background clearing system
The charging systems managed by different ETC system operators involve the settlement of accounts between the operator’s business systems. How the operator performs account settlement depends on the specific circumstances of the operator. With reference to the experience of the telecommunications industry, there are currently two more common clearing methods, the central clearing method and the decentralized clearing method.
(1) Central liquidation method.
Generally speaking, the central clearing method is to establish a neutral ETC central clearing system on top of each ETC system operator to be responsible for the issuance and circulation management of electronic tags, maintain the consumption accounts of ETC users, and the clearing split occurs in multiple ETC systems Matters such as road tolls between operators. The relationship is shown in Figure 3.
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The central clearing system for ETC network charges can directly handle the above matters, or indirectly through a financial institution-such as a bank. A more preferable way is to directly establish an internal ETC central clearing system in the manual networked charging centers of various provinces, so as to be responsible for the ETC clearing and other businesses of the province. Each ETC system operator and the central clearing system need to ensure that the ETC front-end equipment is fully compatible and interchangeable with the detailed technical specifications, the data format of the electronic label, the EFC Context Mark of each operator, the electronic label access key, and the authentication key. The unified vehicle classification standard, the charging standard of each road section, the format of the original passing record, the generation, distribution and processing methods of black and gray lists, and the exchange of charges and accounting information have reached consensus on a series of issues. This central clearing ETC networked operation method has a clear system structure, clear division of labor for all parties, and strong operability. At the same time, the ETC networked charging central clearing system can be conveniently established on the basis of networked charging centers in various provinces. Therefore, this operation method is an ideal choice for ETC network charging applications based on a central account.
(2) Decentralized liquidation method.
In a nutshell, the distributed operation management method is that, on the basis of ensuring that the ETC front-end equipment is fully compatible and interchangeable, each ETC system operator completes the exchange of original charging records, accounting data and other necessary information between the ETC operators. The ETC network toll operation method of splitting and clearing the tolls of road sections. The mutual relationship is shown in Figure 4.
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As with the central clearing method, ETC system operators need to reach consensus on a series of issues such as ensuring the complete compatibility of ETC front-end equipment and related solutions. In addition, each ETC system operator also needs to exchange real original charging information between them in a safe and controllable way, and how to use these original charging information to split the accounts between the operators. And the handling of tolls for special vehicles. Under this kind of operation management method, the clearing tasks of tolls are distributed to each operator, which is completed by each operator’s own processing program, and most of the functions can be implemented in the lane software layer, the so-called On-site debating. The realization of this function of splitting accounts is very common in the existing lane control software of the manual network toll system based on tolls. This kind of distributed operation management ETC network operation method, the task of toll clearing is decentralized, so there is no need to spend huge investment in establishing a unified central clearing system, which is also the advantage of this operation method.
2 The solution of ETC system in the application of network charging at the current stage
2.1 The charging medium used by the charging system
At present, the common toll coupons in the domestic highway toll system include paper printed coupons, paper magnetic coupons, one-dimensional barcode coupons, two-dimensional barcode coupons, magnetic cards, contact IC cards, and non-contact IC cards. The IC card can be used for prepaid business. After years of charging practice, the charging system has paid more and more attention to the performance and technical requirements of the degree of automation, reading and writing methods, data security, media costs, civilized printing and management costs in the selection of charging media. Due to the many drawbacks of using cash payment at the exit of the road network, prepayment transactions will be the inevitable choice for road tolls to be paid from cash to non-cash, and IC cards that comply with financial integrated circuit specifications have also become the first choice for toll media.
2.2 The combined use of electronic tags and IC cards
Any electronic label without an IC card is called a single-chip electronic label, and an electronic label with an IC card interface and inserted into the IC card when in use is called a two-chip electronic label. Generally, two-piece electronic tags have the ability to support reading and writing to contact IC cards and non-contact IC cards. At present, most of the electronic non-stop tolling technology solutions commonly used abroad are monolithic ETC systems, which are very suitable for the application environment with high ETC vehicle usage. However, this kind of system operates in a closed toll environment and is completely separated from the existing manual semi-automatic toll system. For our country’s highway network, this solution will face a large scale of system transformation, a high one-time investment, and a long construction period. It is a problem, and at non-main line toll stations with low traffic volume, it is neither economical nor necessary to disassemble and install existing system equipment or build special ETC lanes. Therefore, the existing foreign programs are not suitable for the current situation of my country’s road network. In order to promote ETC system toll collection under the conditions of my country’s “One Road, One Company” road management model and existing toll facilities, a breakthrough must be made in the design of the scheme.
Because the existing technical conditions are difficult to achieve long-life operation of the electronic tag on the non-contact IC card (at least it can be used, and the issuance value is only a year), so under the condition that the contact IC card is not accepted by the existing charging system , The system must have the ability to read and write in two ways after the system is reformed during the design of the scheme, that is, the electronic tag adopts the contact reading and writing method and the existing manual semi-automatic charging system adopts the non-contact reading and writing method.
2.3 Solutions for combined electronic toll collection technology
At present, the IC card industry has introduced IC cards that can support both contact reading and writing methods and non-contact reading and writing methods, called “dual interface IC cards”. The so-called combined electronic toll collection is a prepaid fee program of “IC card swiping payment/ETC electronic payment + dual chip electronic tag + dual interface IC card”. The specific program design is as follows.
(1) The IC truck road toll collection system is designed with a dedicated toll collection machine that supports ISO 7816 and ISO1443 protocols and can read and write Mifare I cards, Mifare Pro cards and dual interface IC cards.
(2) Adopt dual-interface IC card as the extended data storage medium of the dual-chip ETC electronic label. The dual-chip ETC electronic tag and dual-interface IC card simultaneously store fixed information including vehicle owner, vehicle model, and vehicle physical parameters. The ETC dual-interface IC card stores information such as account number, balance, transaction records, entry and exit numbers, and the information stored in the dual-interface IC card can be read and written in contact and non-contact ways.
(3) The ETC lane antenna controller and the lane IC card dedicated toll device are installed at the same time in the toll dedicated lane, which is controlled by a lane industrial control computer to realize the collection of tolls for normal ETC vehicles and ordinary vehicles strayed into, as well as gray and black lists Verification, original transaction record generation, lane traffic control and other functions.
(4) At toll stations with large traffic volume and easy to produce traffic bottlenecks, more than 7 dedicated ETC toll lanes are set up as needed, allowing drivers to insert dual-interface IC cards into dual-chip ETC electronic tags, and pass through the toll stations without stopping. Fees are automatically deducted, greatly improving the capacity of toll gates.
(6) In general toll booths, only IC card toll lanes are set up, allowing drivers to dial out dual-interface IC cards from the dual-chip ETC electronic tags to deduct money by swiping the card in a non-contact manner, and then pass the toll booth after a short stop. Its operating mode is shown in Figure 5.
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The combined electronic toll collection technology program has the following advantages:
(1) The advantages of IC card charging and ETC charging are concentrated, and the effective combination of manual and ETC methods is realized in the networked charging system;
(2) Provide a convenient/fast/safe/reliable solution for the networked charging system to carry out prepaid services;
(3) The number of ETC lanes is set according to the actual conditions such as traffic volume, and the system is highly reliable / the investment and scale are flexible, and it is easy to pilot and promote;
(4) Provide effective means to solve the traffic bottleneck of the ring road network in the central city and the inter-city road network in the regional economic circle;
(5) Comply with China’s financial card regulations and e-commerce and other countries’ encouraging development directions. It is foreseeable that for a long period of time in the future, ETC system charging will only be a supplementary method to the IC card charging system. The main purpose of the application at this stage is to solve the traffic congestion problem at key road section toll stations. For the ETC system currently implemented in China, the IC card toll collection system must be emphasized as a backup system for the ETC lane to ensure the smooth operation of the system in the event of a failure.
3 Application promotion and standardization of ETC system
In recent years, some provinces and cities in China have successively introduced ETC systems. Their actual operation results show that ETC systems are safe/stable/accurate and reliable. The introduction of these projects has achieved great results, and has accumulated valuable experience for the development and application of my country’s ETC system. However, an in-depth investigation found that the ETC systems introduced in various places are incompatible with each other. The application advantage of the ETC system lies in the networking operation of the regional road network. If the ETC systems in various regions are not compatible with each other, their social and economic benefits will be greatly reduced. Moreover, if the application of one card 7 is not effectively coordinated, it will It will seriously affect the healthy development and subsequent development and application of the ETC system in my country. Therefore, the work of formulating standards and specifications for the ETC system must be carried out as soon as possible.
As the current ETC standards published by countries such as Europe, the United States, and Japan are not uniform, and the International Organization for Standardization has not formulated a unified international standard, according to the specific conditions of the current system operation in my country and the technical standards supported by most ETC system manufacturers, you can choose The following 3 standards promulgated by CEM/T 278 are the basic requirements for the front-end equipment of the ETC system (Table 1)
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In addition, in order to ensure the interoperability of equipment, other detailed rules and standards should be formulated, including network clearing system interface specifications, ETC lane system design specifications, electronic tag reading and writing technical specifications, data structures, device communication protocols, etc.
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