CLIENTS

  CASE STUDIES

Client : INTERLINK ROADS
URL : www.m5motorway.com.au
Project : Violation Enforcement System for Sydney’s M5 Motorway

Profile
Interlink Roads is the developer and operator of the M5 South-West Motorway, a high-speed transit corridor spanning 22 km of Sydney's south-west from Prestons to Beverly Hills. Around 118,000 vehicles per day use the M5.

Challenge
There are around 3,000 toll violations daily on the M5, amounting to almost 3% of all vehicles passing through the motorway’s tollgates. Toll violations can result from a range of factors such as vehicles without electronic tags passing through tag-only lanes, tag malfunctions, or accounts with insufficient credit.
Large amounts of complex data are involved in the reading of tags and processing of toll transactions. Customer account data, tollgate camera images and billing systems all need to work effectively together to protect against revenue loss.
Interlink Roads approached Dataforce seeking an improved solution to handle the large volumes of violations and associated data.

Solution
Dataforce quickly analysed a data bottleneck in the existing database systems handling violations transactions. The system relied on a database that was not scalable enough for the amounts of data involved.
Within less than two weeks, Dataforce seamlessly migrated the data to an Oracle database – a solution that is capable of handling millions of pieces of data and is almost infinitely scalable to cope with growth of changing patterns of use. This provided protection against possible loss of revenues.
Having remedied the initial problem, Dataforce proceeded to work with Interlink on successive and incremental improvements to the system. These included phasing out and completely replacing the old application with a new and more user-friendly one which now handles multiple important steps in the business process of recording violation and collecting payments. For example, the image processing system for tollgate camera images was completely replaced, allowing vehicle data to be transmitted to the Roads and Traffic Authority for automatic generation of violation notice letters.

Benefits
The system provides Interlink Roads with essential protection against potential revenue losses from toll violations – a value to the business in the order of tens of thousands of dollars per day.
The integration and automation of various steps in the violation enforcement and collection process significantly reduces repetitive manual tasks.