Asfinag – A countrywide ITS solution in Austria

The Asfinag project is a countrywide ITS solution that connects regionalized road and tunnel CCTV systems to control centres throughout Austria, with the main one being in Vienna, and manages them from those centres. A full-scale, fault-free test operation has been conducted since the beginning of 2005. This was achieved using Teleste’s VMX Video Management System.

The design of the system is based on concepts of modularity, open architecture and the use of industrial standards. The system consists of a set of encoders, decoders, transcoders, video matrixes, and so forth. The combination of the well-defined functionality of the system modules and open interfaces provides a solid base for a scalable, distributed system.

Customer need

• With a centralized ITS solution, it is easier and more efficient to operate the regional road and tunnel networks.
• An EFC (electronic toll collection) system was introduced by the state-owned ASFINAG to ensure sufficient funding for maintaining and operating the road network.
• The safety and convenience of the users of motorways and express roads is improved with a monitoring system covering a major part of the road network, including tunnels and bridges.

Solution to customer’s need

• Installation sites for the system include road tunnels and bridges, surface roads and monitoring centres.
• The system runs on a variety of underlying physical networks, including Gigabit Ethernet over SM fibre, radio links with various bandwidths, SDH, PDH, G.703, black/dark fibre, ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network and the Internet. It also includes miscellaneous network equipment, including CISCO Catalyst series equipment supporting multicast and SNMP-based performance monitoring.
• The video application is a true distributed, fully scalable, 3-tier system supporting automatic overbooking protection of network bandwidth and automatic prioritization of network traffic. The application operates in an integrated mode (common multi-application front end) or native mode (using Teleste VMX Clients). It includes centralized recording and playback.
• Teleste VMX is integrated with the central technical system: Teleste VMX Client as frontend, underlying safety, security and automation systems, analogue CCTV: Video matrixes and motorized camera units, 24/7 operation and performance monitoring.
• The system enables remote monitoring, diagnostics, support and maintenance, and remote control of CCTV components: matrixes, quad, motorized P/T/Z/F camera units, dome cameras.
• Receiving sites are equipped with both Teleste and third-party decoders.
• To also ensure the best possible video quality for decoding sites with less available bandwidth, each video input (camera) is simultaneously triple encoded: MPEG-4 with two different sets of parameters and a JPEG stream (1 fps).
• Figures:
  • Total number of cameras: ~5200
  • Number of encoding channels: ~3280
  • Number of recorded channels: ~35
  • Number of HW decoding channels: ~1360
  • Number of SW decoding channels: ~380
  • Number of VMX Clients: ~145

Benefits achieved

Design of the system is based on concepts of modularity, open architecture and use of industrial standards. Structure of the system follows 3-tier architecture principles. Resources are represented by a set of encoders, decoders, transcoders, video matrixes, etc. Business logic tier is build by Policy Management Servers, which is responsible for the system control and resource allocation. Finally, the topmost tier is build by the Client software that provides operator GUI (Graphical User Interface) on the operating workstations.

Interfaces between tiers are well defined in order to enable extensibility and simplify integration within distributed system. Standard network protocols (TCP/IP) and flexible notation for high level interfaces make a foundation for data flow in the system and communication between tiers. Combination of well-defined functionality of the system modules and open interfaces provides a solid base for scalable distributed system.

Project partners

• PKE Electronics AG: Main contractor network infrastructure Installations, deployment, support and maintenance.
• Teleste Corporation: Video application and system integration.