NHAI Introduces New Surveillance System on National Highways.

1. NHAI Introduces New Surveillance System on National Highways The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has started the installation process of a new surveillance system which is set to be a part of the Incident Management System (IMS) project for India’s National Highways (NHs). The autonomous agency of the Government of India has already started equipping ten national highway Toll gates with this system and the future plan is to extend the adoption of it to 200 Toll plazas. The initial phase of this plan has a pre-set completion margin of 6 months from the date of commencement. The new surveillance system will collect traffic at Toll plazas via its low-latency Internet Protocol (IP) cameras and one of a kind imaging technology and divert it to a command centre in a Regional Office (RO) which is governing the highway area. According to Akhilesh Srivastava, CGM (IT & Operations), NHAI, when the IP cameras become operational, they will transmit time-stamped photographs to the command centre of the NHAI. Once the Toll lane gets packed with traffic above and beyond the mandated limit, the camera will switch to video mode automatically and a live-stream of data will commence, alerting the command centre in the process. If the flow of traffic doesn’t smoothen within half an hour of the alert, the system will send signals to the command centres for dispatching special units for mitigation. This framework will provide full control of the highway functioning to the command centres, 24 hour live feed access of the highways, and live data on the entire stretch of highways. To ease the difficult transition from the existing infrastructure to a technologically advanced one, the NHAI has already installed high-speed Internet at all concerned RO command centres. The Incident Management System (IMS), which is set to be equipped with the latest surveillance system, integrates equipment including cameras and sensors with databases to ease the flow of traffic around the Toll plazas on the NHs. This system i.e. IMS, gathers data on incidents, such as accidents and notifies the command station. Enabling this system also sees inclusion of facilities such as ambulances, cranes, tow-away vehicles, etc. The IMS also collects real-time information on highways such as equipment and software, makes use of it in stimulating 3D maps, and sends it over to a command centre for integration and processing. Meanwhile, The NHAI is also reportedly in talks with a global organisation for further augmenting the levels of technology used for the IMS. The technology will allow the personnel to view 70 separate images of the entire highways network on a single screen. At the same time, it will also allow tracking of vehicles across the highways by entering its registration number. #AkhileshSrivastava #NHAI #EmergencyIncidentManagementonHighways