Design and implementation of low cost electronic toll collection system in India

Manual toll systems in India are ubiquitous at present. This paper outlines a novel approach illustrating an electronic toll collection (ETC) system which will accomplish the goal of contact less toll payment and cutting edge surveillance system making this ETC system more reliable. The use of Radio frequency identification (RFID) based smart card has been used for self-payment service. Vehicle like car, trucks or a trailer trucks does not possess similar weight. This concept has been implemented with the use of strain gauge load cell to determine the vehicles weight and accordingly defining the vehicles type. The load cell has been interfaced with Arduino Mega 2560 which will determine the toll tax of the vehicles. The smart card reader ACR122U NFC reader has also been interfaced with Arduino Mega 2560 to debit the appropriate toll tax for the specific vehicle type. The optical character recognition (OCR) system has also been used as a primary surveillance system which plays a key role in helping the enforcement department for vehicle licence plate identification. This ETC system will be a state of the art technology for the areas with high traffic in toll plaza by omitting long queues and fuel wastage for the users and also reducing human error.