Ingenieur Vol 58 April-June 2014 Ingenieur Vol 58 April-June 2014 | Page 25

Figure 3: Radio Frequency Identification tag readers are fitted on gantries over the roadway that enables Open Road Tolling on an expressway in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Camera systems are also commonly employed for surveillance and enforcement. (Source: Miami-Dade Expressway Authority Official Website, http://www. mdxort.com/) Figure 4: The Tokyo Traffic Control Centre ensures smooth traffic operations throughout Tokyo Metropolis around the clock. The centre also has the capability to handle unusual situations such as big events and disasters. (Source: http://www.shifteast.com/inside-thetokyo-traffic-control-center/ methodology of video image processing (VIP) through video detector and automatic vehicle identification (AVI) tag reader by radio frequency identification (RFID) was employed. RFID is commonly used for Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) system whereby vehicles are fitted with transponders that are electronically debited when passing through tag readers on a tolled road. Owing to its high speed detection rate, RFID enables Open Road Tolling (ORT) environment or Multi-Lane Free Flow (MLFF) where the tag readers are fitted on gantries over the roadways, thus eliminating the need of toll booths and enabling toll payment while vehicles pass through near highway speed (Figure 3). This eliminates the safety risk of vehicles weaving to get to their desired lanes at toll plazas. Tokyo Traffic Control Centre Rather than for toll collection, the RFID technology used for the AVI in Hong Kong captures the vehicle identification information and time stamps of vehicles passing subsequent tag readers to compute the average speed and journey time. The detection method employed is just one example of a myriad of ways traffic data