Leveraging data & analytics to demystify national highway toll operations

National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is a Central Authority to develop, maintain and manage the National Highways entrusted to it by the Government of India. Currently NHAI has 720+ toll plazas on different national highways under their control. These Tolls generate a huge revenue for the government and are managed by NHAI itself & different agencies who are empanelled by the NHAI. 

The Challenge

After the successful rollout of the ETC Programme, It became crucial for NHAI to ensure that ETC penetration increases at Toll Plazas. To achieve this, Critical devices that enable ETC collection possible at plaza should be mandatorily in working condition. At present NHAI doesn’t have a mechanism to have a direct visibility of ETC Infrastructure at Plaza Level. 

A lot of transactional data gets generated at Plaza as a result of toll collection. At present this data sits at individual plaza level and is shared with NHAI in summarized form only. This is a highly crucial and important data which shall be used by NHAI for various strategic purposes but due to the fact that it is decentralized and is managed by several stakeholders, it is hardly being used and there is no real time insights to help them make informed decisions.

Solution

Auriga IT envisioned a project “Toll Monitoring & Control Center” to develop solutions that can leverage data & analytics to demystify national highway toll operations for NHAI. The solution comprises of following modules – 

Central Real Time Health Monitoring System

 It is very critical to have all Toll Lanes operational to have minimum traffic and it required remote Health monitoring of all devices installed at Toll booth such as Boom-barrier, RFID Card Reader, CPU, Camera at the Toll Plaza in real time.   Auriga installed and configured an IOT device to capture the health of all devices and developed a system that can provide them a real-time visibility of ETC infrastructure and can help NHAI in strict adherence to the government mandate. System also generates automated alerts whenever any device goes down for more than a predefined period.  

Central Toll Data Lake

Auriga built a central data lake which acts as a central repository for all the transactional data being generated at NH Toll Plazas. Auriga set up a cloud based centralized data repository for all data related to toll collection, NPCI Data, TMS Data from toll plazas, Traffic Survey data, Sukhad Yatra Mobile App, TIS, etc. This is a high velocity & high volume data (more than 6GB data per day) that is stored and processed in distributed server architecture. 

Video Analytics

Used computer vision models to automatically detect, count & classify various types of vehicles passing the toll plazas. Advanced object detection, localization algorithms were run on GPUs to process the video feeds in real time. More than 10TBs of video feeds are processed and analyzed every day.

Business Intelligence 

Auriga built a data analytics platform that can generate real time insights and reports that can help them in making informed decisions based on a data driven approach. A BI layer was created over this data to generate real time reports, to provide actionable insights and to make predictions. More than 20 million transactions are processed everyday to generate various reports and dashboards. 

Project Highlights

• Integration with various Toll Management solutions provider and Implementation at 720+ Toll Plazas
• One of its kind data repository that syncs and receives data from hundreds of different data sources in real time.
• A 24×7 running command & control center