NHAI’s New Surveillance System for Monitoring Traffic & Highway Operations

Roads are the largest mode of transportation in India; nearly 90 percent of commuting and industrial freight are facilitated by roads. And only 2 percent of all roads, which are highways, carry around 40 percent of all trade and commerce activities. Due to this, traffic congestion on these transport networks comes as a major problem. To ease the flow of traffic and operations on roads, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) initiated the installation of the surveillance system in the country recently.

National Highways Authority of India’s advanced surveillance system comes under its ongoing Advanced Traffic Management System (ATMS) project, which also is known as Traffic Incident Emergency Management System (TIMS). The Central government’s autonomous agency is set to equip all Toll plazas with put the surveillance system into action by the end of 2018.

To enhance the security and traffic management infrastructure at the Toll plazas, the NHAI aims to position IP cameras at 10 Toll gates over the next six months. With built-in sophisticated imaging technology, IP cameras will give real-time information on the flow of traffic, a Command & Control station at a Region Office (RO) will extract the data, and the supervisors will analyse the data and deploy measures to clear gridlocks and other traffic incidents.

For every 30 minutes, the IP camera sends time-stamped photographs to the RO command centres, and it works round the clock. The low-latency IP camera will decongest the flux of traffic at the Toll lanes by live streaming traffic-related data. If the decongestion is not done within 30 minutes, then the surveillance facility will send prompt alerts to the RO command centres to take necessary actions to bring the situation back to the normal.

The surveillance project is under the NHAI and its chief general manager, Akhilesh Srivastava. It facilitates real-time traffic monitoring to Dynamic Message Sign (DMS) monitoring and control, traffic signal monitoring and control, traffic camera monitoring and control, active traffic management, road weather information system, and more.

By integrating high-definition cameras, sensors, and databases, the surveillance system will improve the existing traffic management system. The surveillance system collects data and transmits the information to the NHAI & RO command centres for integration and processing.

The Incident Management System (IMS) is at the heart of this new surveillance system that helps in processing data on road accidents and traffic congestion, and deploys relevant facilities such as ambulance, tow-away cranes, GPS-monitored patrol vehicles, and more.

Enabling the new surveillance system, the IMS will not only improve road safety but also manage traffic. Initially, the NHAI will be implementing it on 10 Toll Plazas: if it works, they will expand it to the rest of the plazas and road junctions and highways.

The new surveillance facility will solve major challenges facing the Indian traffic and enhance road transportation and commute.Also, this will eliminate crimes and fraudulent practices on national highways. The NHAI has already installed high-speed Internet connections at relevant regional command centres.

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