Case Study AI-Based Toll Enforcement in Poland

Effective enforcement for free-flow toll system

In 2021, the Polish government decided to implement a new toll system to reduce personnel workload and congestion at toll stations. To this end, the Polish government opted for a free-flow toll solution: an e-TOLL system.

It is used on selected sections of motorways, expressways and national roads managed by the GDDKiA (General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways) and applies to owners/users/holders of motor vehicles and vehicle combinations with a permissible weight of more than 3.5 tons. Buses are also toll-liable regardless of their total weight.

Unlike the old system, which worked with stop-and-go and manual control/payment at toll stations, the new system is based on satellite positioning technology. This enables drivers to pay road tolls via mobile applications, among other things, without having to stop at checkpoints or service stations.

As beneficial as the new fully digital procedure is, it makes it easy to bypass payment, whether intentionally or accidentally. A problem that needed a solution in the form of a reliable toll enforcement system that would provide accurate data to enforce the correct payment of tolls without interfering with the newly established free-flowing traffic.

For this task, the Ministry of Finance in Poland developed specifications describing the requirements for the necessary toll enforcement solution. The device or system had to provide:

Ministry of Finance in Poland – National Revenue Administration (Krajowa Administracja Skarbowa, KAS)

The National Revenue Administration is a state body operating under the supervision of the Ministry of Finance in Poland.

Its main objective is to protect the interests of the national treasury and the customs territory of the European Union. The KAS is responsible for the collection of taxes, custom duties, fees and other non-tax receivables that contribute to the state budget. One of the key tasks of KAS in Poland is the fee collection for the use of toll road sections via the electronic toll collection system (e-TOLL). The Road Transport Inspectorate, in turn, is an important parallel operator for control activities in the e-TOLL system.

AI-based toll enforcement and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR)

VITRONIC supported the Ministry of Finance and the KAS by taking over the entire implementation of the toll enforcement solutions. For this purpose, the traffic technology provider installed a new generation of its TOLLCHECKER, an AI-based toll sensor, at the sites. The system now captures passing vehicles based on a visual analysis, automatically reads their number plates and assigns the vehicles to one of 15 defined categories.

The AI-based toll enforcement systems have been installed at stationary gantries and toll plazas. In addition to the stationary enforcement, VITRONIC supplied patrol cars equipped with the Enforcement Bar – a fully automatic and mobile number plate recognition system (ANPR) – as a mobile enforcement solution.

VITRONIC supplies 40 toll enforcement stations and 102 modified patrol cars as mobile enforcement solutions

VITRONIC implemented the electronic toll payment enforcement systems at the former 21 toll stations according to the customer's specifications and undertook the construction and implementation of 19 new checkpoints for the Ministry of Finance. The contract was signed in 2021 and the project was successfully implemented in the following months.

The delivery of the vehicles was required within a period of four months. One of the first steps taken by the VITRONIC team was to prepare prototypes – from the bodywork to the equipment and additional functionalities – in order to present them to the customer and refine the features. In several meetings, the requirements specified in the tender were discussed in detail and the configuration of the vehicles was tailored precisely to the customer's needs.

Improved traffic flow on toll motorway sections and secured toll revenues

The implementation of a solution based on GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) technology combined with neural networks and modern ANPR technology has made it possible to open the gates at the toll stations (on A2 and A4 motorway sections managed by the General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways). This has reduced the travel time of road users, which translates into lower costs for them. The reduction in CO2 emissions is also noteworthy.

The solution implemented by VITRONIC with its service platform gantries ("walk-through") allows efficient maintenance of the enforcement infrastructure without interfering with the flow of traffic.

Thanks to the use of AI technology with its precise analysis capability, as well as ANPR technology with the highest reading rate, over 98% and almost 100% for human readable measurements, within the new e-TOLL system, toll payments can be reliably enforced, taking all tariffs into account.