A Framework for Electronic Toll Collection in Smart and Connected Communities

Abstract—The number of vehicles plying the highways keeps growing at a steady pace, leading to high maintenance costs. Toll collection was introduced as a means of raising funds for road maintenance, but the traditional method is usually slow and is prone to cause vehicular traffic congestion on the highways. In this paper, a framework was proposed for Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) in smart and connected communities. The main components of the intelligent system architecture are the wireless sensor nodes, web and mobile applications, and a cloud platform. The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) enables vehicle detection and classification, and establishes a communication link to the back-end of the system. The central database and the web server are hosted in the Cloud while a mobile application is used for electronic transactions, subscription renewal, notification of toll payments, and for tracking toll payment history. In addition, a web dash board is provided for efficient toll administration. The implementation of this system will improve the toll collection efficiency in terms of speed and flexibility. Overall, the contribution of this work extends the frontier of WSNs to the domain of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)

A Cloud-Based Intelligent Toll Collection System for Smart Cities

Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) systems may be adopted by city managers to combat the problems of long vehicular queues, fuel wastage, high accident risks, and environmental pollution that come with the use of traditional or manual toll collection systems. In this paper, an intelligent system is developed to eliminate long vehicular queues, fuel wastage, high accident risks, and environmental pollution in a smart city based on seamless interconnections of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), and web and mobile applications that run on an Internet of Things (IoT)-Enabled cloud platform. A ZigBee WSN is designed and implemented using an Arduino UNO, XBee S2 radios, an XBee Shield, and a Seeduino GPRS Shield. For vehicle owners to make toll payments, view toll historical data, and get toll news feeds, a web application and a mobile application are designed and implemented based on Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Javascript and Hyper Text Pre-processor (PHP). The mobile application is deployed using an Android platform. A cloud platform was also developed to provide business logic functionalities by using PHP as a scripting language, and MySQL as the database engine driver. Deployment of the developed ETC system in smart and connected communities will drastically minimize the challenges of long vehicular queues, fuel wastage, high accident risks, and environmental pollution in urban centers

Pay as You Go: A Generic Crypto Tolling Architecture

The imminent pervasive adoption of vehicular communication, based on dedicated short-range technology (ETSI ITS G5 or IEEE WAVE), 5G, or both, will foster a richer service ecosystem for vehicular applications. The appearance of new cryptography based solutions envisaging digital identity and currency exchange are set to stem new approaches for existing and future challenges. This paper presents a novel tolling architecture that harnesses the availability of 5G C-V2X connectivity for open road tolling using smartphones, IOTA as the digital currency and Hyperledger Indy for identity validation. An experimental feasibility analysis is used to validate the proposed architecture for secure, private and convenient electronic toll payment

Equity in the Digital Age: How Health Information Technology Can Reduce Disparities

While enormous medical and technological advancements have been made over the last century, it is only very recently that there have been similar rates of development in the field of health information technology (HIT).This report examines some of the advancements in HIT and its potential to shape the future health care experiences of consumers. Combined with better data collection, HIT offers signi?cant opportunities to improve access to care, enhance health care quality, and create targeted strategies that help promote health equity. We must also keep in mind that technology gaps exist, particularly among communities of color, immigrants, and people who do not speak English well. HIT implementation must be done in a manner that responds to the needs of all populations to make sure that it enhances access, facilitates enrollment, and improves quality in a way that does not exacerbate existing health disparities for the most marginalized and underserved

Achieving genuinely dynamic road user charging : issues with a GNSS-based approach

Peer reviewedPostprin

Road charging in the Czech Republic and EU and external costs of transport

In the paper the Czech toll system and its future are presented. E-toll Czech project: Facts and Figures (today) are included and the next steps in the process of developing microwave infrastructure are mentioned. In the event of possible system extension of the roads of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd class (ca 55,000 km), the satellite technology will be used. The feasibility of such a combination of these two technologies, microwave and satellite, is subject to the compatibility of both systems in terms of the control equipment. For the microwave toll system, economic analyses according to EU directives were prepared for the Czech Ministry of Transport. Special attention is paid to the problems of traffic congestion, noise and damage to the environment, on the basis of the "user pays" and "polluter pays" according to the Eurovignette Directive principles. A complete survey of the EU toll system is included in the list of information sources

Traffic Congestion Pricing Methods and Technologies

This paper reviews the methods and technologies for congestion pricing of roads. Congestion tolls can be implemented at scales ranging from individual lanes on single links to national road networks. Tolls can be differentiated by time of day, road type and vehicle characteristics, and even set in real time according to current traffic conditions. Conventional toll booths have largely given way to electronic toll collection technologies. The main technology categories are roadside-only systems employing digital photography, tag and beacon systems that use short-range microwave technology, and in vehicle-only systems based on either satellite or cellular network communications. The best technology choice depends on the application. The rate at which congestion pricing is implemented, and its ultimate scope, will depend on what technology is used and on what other functions and services it can perform. Since congestion pricing calls for the greatest overall degree of toll differentiation, congestion pricing is likely to drive the technology choice.Road pricing; Congestion pricing; Electronic Toll Collection technology

Sequences of purchases in credit card data reveal life styles in urban populations

Zipf-like distributions characterize a wide set of phenomena in physics, biology, economics and social sciences. In human activities, Zipf-laws describe for example the frequency of words appearance in a text or the purchases types in shopping patterns. In the latter, the uneven distribution of transaction types is bound with the temporal sequences of purchases of individual choices. In this work, we define a framework using a text compression technique on the sequences of credit card purchases to detect ubiquitous patterns of collective behavior. Clustering the consumers by their similarity in purchases sequences, we detect five consumer groups. Remarkably, post checking, individuals in each group are also similar in their age, total expenditure, gender, and the diversity of their social and mobility networks extracted by their mobile phone records. By properly deconstructing transaction data with Zipf-like distributions, this method uncovers sets of significant sequences that reveal insights on collective human behavior.Comment: 30 pages, 26 figure