Origins of 407 technology

A Hughes TMS veteran says the origins of the Highway 407 technology lie in decisions by parent company General Motors to push subsidiary Hughes Aircraft into gaining half its revenues from non-military sales: “The top people saw peace breaking out and ‘commercialization’ became the slogan.”

This led Hughes to form its Transportation Management Systems (TMS) subsidiary in 1989. With interest growing in a range of vehicle-to-roadside communications functions and the market already served by companies making passive backscatter systems, Hughes worked on more capable, more expensive active communications that might be able to serve a range of purposes.

Since for the forseeable future there will be vehicles without a transponder, the first requirement for any automated toll highway is to read license plates. Pattern recognition technology from the front end of Air Force missiles manufactured by Hughes is at the heart of 407’s license plate reading system. First work was done by Jim Alves of Hughes Missile Systems Division. Digital cameras image the rear of cars the same way lenses in optically guided missiles image their target and compare it with a pre-imaged picture of a target. The power is in the ability to match images. This forms the backup system to the vehicle-to-roadside communications, if the vehicle does not have a transponder or if it is not functioning.

Tracking: The second new aspect of the Hughes e-toll system is angle-of-arrival (AOA) radio tracking, a well-established military technology that measures the angle-of-arrival of an incoming radio signal at two or more separated receiver points and uses simple geometry to establish the position of the transponder. By repeatedly locating the the object it tracks it, enabling even very closely spaced vehicles with transponders to be distinguished from one another. The third special aspect of the Hughes technology is the use of “slotted Aloha TDMA” protocol which was devised by electronics engineers at the University of Hawaii (hence the “Aloha”) for the military’s high capacity wireless communications as far back as World War Two. By breaking communications into small packets designed to fit into tiny time slots (TD for time division) the protocol allows multiple access (the MA) to a single communications channel.

It is most common for toll transponders to be dealt with by the roadside reader one at a time, with gantry antennas focussed on separate vehicle spaces on the road, but TDMA allows communication to be broken into separately allocated packets so during the 3 or 4 seconds that a vehicle is within the 100m range of the reader, a bunch of different transponders in different vehicles can be communicating with the gantry equipment, each having the attention of the reader for a part of a millisecond time frames, allowing far more complicated or longer messages to be exchanged — effectively simultaneous communciations with one reader by a collection of closely travelling vehicles.

The Hughes technology is overkill where electronic tolling is retrofitted into existing toll plazas. In those situations transponders are used in constrained lanes where a gantry-mounted antenna can be focussed on a segment of the roadway and where the vehicle travels at half or less of highway speed. And Hughes hasn’t seriously pushed its system for that. The ‘slotted Aloha TDMA’ has however become the de facto North American standard for heavy truck communications with weigh stations (see “HELP’s PrePass takes off” p11) and is being implemented for truck clearance at a number of border crossings where its greater data rate capacity is important.

407 with multiple-lane full highway speed traffic is a new kind of toll road and Hughes argues must have the new angle-of-arrival tracking feature and higher data rate capabilities of an active multiplexing vehicle-to-roadside communications, though that is a proposition that is vigrously contested by Amtech, Texas Instruments, Combitech and others which use passive backscatter technology.

Combitech in Oz

Due to open in 1999 the City Link (MCL) toll project in Melbourne Australia is likely to be the next fully automatic multi-lane free flow toll road after 407. Combitech has the prime tolling contract. It proposes to use the same modulated backscatter technology at MCL that it has deployed successfully in Europe, South America and Asia in regular toll plazas. Combitech claims to have proven the efficacy of its systems in an open road tolling on the Tauern Autobahn in Austria, and must have satisfied the Australians with that demonstration. However just as there are skeptics about how well the Hughes system will work on 407, so there are skeptics about Combitech and the Tauern Autobahn. The Tauern installation was initially billed as a permanent installation intended to open to the public. A major marketing campaign and plans for a public rollout were foreshadowed. However the Tauern installation has never been opened to the public, and officials now describe it as just a pilot project or demonstration.

A Hughes official says bluntly he doesn’t think the Combitech technology, which he describes as “the best of the backscatter systems” is adequate for open road tolling. Of Melbourne City Link, he says: “I am sure Combitech is working very hard to upgrade their system but I just don’t think they will meet the specifications. Melbourne City Link laid down very stringent specs. I just don’t believe the Combitech technology is up to the task.”

Hughes were bitter at losing the Melbourne job and some said Combitech had deployed government subsidies and worse, to beat them. Melbourne officials said Hughes lost the competition to Combitech on price. Mitsubishi was also in there to the last. Australia has long links to Sweden with the original telephone system there being based on Swedish equipment and support.

FOR SALE

It is quite an irony that just as Hughes TMS, a subsidiary of General Motors, opens the first great showcase of its technology that it’s future is quite uncertain. A Boston business broker has been working to find a buyer for Hughes TMS for more than a year — reported going price $60m. There have been talks with Raytheon, Thomson, Hitachi, Tadiran, Denso and others. The latest we hear is that discussions continue with Philips, SAIC and Canadian Highways International Corp. One of the problems in making the sale is the potential liability of Hughes TMS to OTCC if its technology doesn’t perform to guaranteed levels on 407. Hughes TMS has been described as a “virtual corporation” many of its employees including the most senior people are employed as consultants. It doesn’t mean they are fly-by-nighters. One has been a “consultant” for 6 years.

Next Israel, Santiago Chile

The world’s next four fully automated toll roads after Melbourne are likely to be the Cross Israel Highway and three turnpikes about to start construction in the Santiago, the largest city of Chile. A concessionaire to build the first section of the Cross-Israel Highway (CIH) or H6 is due to be selected later this year but it has already been decided that the road has to be built for open road highway-speed tolling. Starting just south of Ben Gurion airport east of Tel-Aviv, the CIH will run 15km inland but parallel to the Med coast to near Haifa and will form the backbone of communications north and south. 90km in length of 4 to 8-lanes it will have 8 to 10 interchanges and is expected to be running 80k veh/day at its busiest section near Tel Aviv soon after opening in 2001. (see TR#8 Oct 96 p5) Toll projects getting under way in Santiago Chile are (1) Kennedy-Costanera, a 34km east-west pike (2) Avenida Velaquez a 21km north-south pike and (3) the 63km Americo Vespuchio beltway that is to be upgraded from a signalized arterial to toll motorway as part of a concession. The Ministry of Public Works which is granting the concessions has insisted on tenderers designing their roads for multi-lane open road automatic tolling and will release specifications for a national automatic toll system in the spring of 1998. (Claudio Garin, Ministry of Public Works 56 2 699 2233)