Electronic Vehicle Registration Picks Up Speed

Last summer, the China Academy of Transportation Sciences (CNATS) signed an exclusive distribution agreement with IPICO for its Electronic Vehicle Toll and Management solution. China's highway system is rapidly expanding—80,000 kilometers (50,000 miles) of new highways are slated for construction by 2010, IPICO says, with the total reaching 150,000 kilometers (93,000 miles) by 2020.

According to IPICO, the new roads will be massive in width. "There are highways in China that are four times as wide as anything you've seen in California," Greaves says. "There are 16 lanes going in each direction." EVR systems such as IPICO's will help the country determine how to build the most efficient highway system, because it can use the tag reads to determine traffic flow and traffic patterns. Now you can get into things like managing whole streets with RFID. If the system tracks that there are too many cars in a particular street, for example, barriers can be triggered to go down, stopping cars from going onto that street, until traffic thins out. Cities will be able to manage traffic streams and traffic velocity."

John Greaves

Still missing with regard to EVR and EVI systems, however, are internationally agreed-upon standards. The ISO 24535 standard, created for basic electronic vehicle registration applications, details only basic functionality, such as sticker tag format, the ability to read and write the tag, and requirements for the amount of data storage and security. But that standard does not define, for example, an air-interface protocol that would describe how tags and readers should communicate.

That said, several regions and countries are adopting their own standards. In January, the South African Bureau of Standards formally published SANS 24535, a framework for electronic registration and identification of vehicles using passive UHF RFID, and SANS 504, which defines parameters for unidirectional air-interface communication of RFID systems. IPICO's IP-X based UHF RFID technology complies with these recently announced standards.

The primary focus of the SANS 24535 standard is to describe a variety of RFID reader-tag scenarios necessary to support deployment of passive UHF RFID. These include requirements for electronic tag registration, for interrogators used during tag registration and for interrogators limited to reading the tags and verifying, or checking, each tag number against associated data. The standard describes the specifications for implementing fixed readers deployed along public roads, as well as for mobile interrogators used by law enforcement officials. SANS 24535 is based on, and supports, ISO 24535.

The United States does not currently have any specific efforts underway to define standards for EVR and EVI systems. One problem the country faces is a legacy of vehicle registration processes and systems that vary from state to state. "Just look at license plates here," Greaves states. "Can you show me a standard? There are different numbering systems in Massachusetts than in Virginia. So right away, you have a difference in data content. It is interesting to note that [U.S. vehicle registration] initiatives and processes date from the 1930s. In other countries, because they don't have the burden of legacy systems, they do not have a state and federal infrastructure that can't be re-engineered."

Consequently, experts predict that EVR and EVI system will be adopted more widely elsewhere than in the United States. "In other parts of the world," Baumhardt explains, "decisions are often made nationally and are federally mandated. In the U.S., of course, it is the individual states that determine vehicle requirements."