INTEROPERABILITY Dual mode e-tags

INTEROPERABILITY

Dual mode e-tag rolls

Dual mode transponders are taking off — the market’s response to incompatible systems. Just this month Advantage CVO (ACVO), the larger of two coalitions of states engaged in electronic (e-) clearance at truck weigh & inspection stations placed the first US order for a Mark IV dual mode “Fusion” transponder. The larger Lockheed-backed Heavy vehicle Electronic License Plate (HELP) group is also a possible customer.

Joe Crabtree of ACVO is excited about the interoperability built into the Mark IV Fusion tag. It was initially designed by Mark IV for Toronto motorists so that they could use the open road tolling capabilities of its Hughes-designed ASTMv6 standard on H-407 and also use the same transponder on the lane-constrained systems of the turnpikes and bridges over the border in the US. Noone is telling Toronto motorists about the tag’s dual mode capabilities yet because the IAG is not yet set up to handle Toronto accounts. So its IAG side remains dormant, for now.

That’s not likely to last long with the Fusion tags being shipped to ACVO in Lexington KY. Indeed the IAG and Mark IV are moving quickly to perform the certification trials of the Fusion tag so it can be got up and running for trucks. Tests will be conducted at one of the Buffalo area toll plazas of the NYS Thruway within weeks.

The IAG represents toll agencies in NY, NJ, PA and DE but IAG specifications have been adopted by VA, MA, IL, and MD and likely to be applied in OH and IN. Rena Barta, director of the IAG says getting trucks equipped with Fusion tags benefits everyone: “We get the new business of longdistance trucks without having to supply tags ourselves and send accounts to some guy in Georgia. ACVO gets to offer its trucking customers a tag which will be much more attractive because of its greater capability. And the trucker only has to have one tag on his windshield and pay one account. It just makes sense for everyone and we want to make it work.”

Mark IV holds exclusive rights to supply electronic toll equipment to the IAG through April 1999 so Mark IV has a lock on the Fusion market for the next year. However at $39.50 it has priced its dual-mode product so competitively with the single mode tag it is making the thing almost a must-buy, in the trucking business.

The dual mode (ASTMv6 & IAG) tag was not too difficult to design because the two systems share many similar procedures for active communication between vehicle and roadside, the IAG having drawn on the open standard from Hughes and simplified it. The systems differ radically however in that the IAG tag (marketed as E-ZPass) is optimized for retrofit into traditional lane-based tolling where vehicles are confined to a single lane (11’ or so wide) by concrete curbs and structural elements at a plaza, and where the under-canopy radio antennas are tuned to find and exchange messages with transponders of vehicles within that narrow lane. By contrast ASTMv6 is optimized for open road communications or multi-lane tolling in which wide-span gantry mounted antennas are tuned to cover more than one lane of roadspace. ASTMv6 uses separate passive tracking antennas to distinguish and track the position of one transponder carrying vehicle from another. It sets up time division protocols for the one communications antenna to conduct virtually simultaneous communication with separate vehicles in the wide zone during the same period.

IAG or ASTMv6 mode

The dual mode tag is set up to be enabled or switched-on by roadside equipment to act as an IAG tag if for example it comes to a New York State Thruway E-ZPass toll lane but it will be signaled to operate as ASTMv6 if it encounters a Toronto 407 toll gantry or an ACVO electronic clearance reader on I-75 in OH or a HELP reader at a weigh station in WY. Of course identifiers and codes have to be organized, and lists of account owners and other relevant data installed in system servers for interoperability to be implemented. But Joe Crabtree of ACVO says that the IAG has been “very keen” to get the dual mode tags working in its system which now does more electronic tolling daily than all the rest of the systems in the US.

Crabtree would like to see interoperability of e-clearance and tolling implemented in GA, FL, TX, OK, KS, all of which use Amtech backscatter systems for tolling but ASTMv6 for truck e-clearance. In California too ASTMv6 does truck clearance both weigh and inspection, and Mexican border crossings. A backscatter spec Title 21 does tolling. Combining backscatter mode such as the Amtech or Title 21 systems and the ASTMv6 into one tag is more challenging than the IAG/ASTMv6 integration, the tekkies say, but it can be done, as is being attempted in ASTMv7. It remains to be seen whether someone thinks it is worth the cost or whether there are better ways.

The whole DSRC standards setting effort of USDOT and ITSA could be bypassed by events like these in the marketplace. Dick Landis of HELP told us the ASTMv6 (rejected by the consensus-seeking standards setters as too accomodating to Hughes) is in fact established as the standard for the current generation of technology. Landis thinks the next generation will be “something completely new, probably satellite based.”

So while USDOT-supported standards writers like Lee Armstrong and Pete Houser patiently deal with the vicissitudes of US government funding and policies, and practice the extraordinary tenacity needed to gain agreement by consensus, the practicalities of the marketplace are setting their own standards out on the road. Joe Crabtree head of ACVO, who placed the first US Fusion order this month was no longer bound by USDOT policy on standards since all his funding now comes from resale of the transponders to truckers and from state governments’ support. He was bound by his own state’s low bid procurement rule however. Once he assured himself that both competing products did the job of open road vehicle-to-roadside communications (the ASTMv6 mode) Crabtree says he had no choice but to accept the $39.50/tag bid from Mark IV rather than the $39.95 bid from Raytheon. (Rena Barta IAG 212 360 3181, Dick Landis HELP 602 254 2708 www.prepass.com, Gregg Dal Ponte MAPS 503 378 6351, Joe Crabtree ACVO 606 257 4508, Paul Manuel Mark IV 905 624 3025)