The Charge Collector System: A New NFC and Smartphone-based Toll Collection System

This paper proposes a new system to collect tolls on Open Road Tolling (ORT) infrastructures. The actual Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) systems do not fulfill fundamental user requirements, such as interoperability and portability between systems and road operators (in the same or different countries), as well as advanced toll logging and reporting (capabilities ensuring user privacy, an interesting feature in car rental or sharing use cases). The Charge Collector System (C2S) is a work in progress project that will provide some features, such as flexible payment options, recording of incurred tolls and make them available to the end user and management entities, exploring a synergy of technologies in ETC scenario, namely Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), Near Field Communication (NFC) and smartphone-based mobile applications. This system is also an approach to interoperable European ETC solutions, in a way that uses DSRC and GNSS-based solutions together.