RFID network able to monitor car movements
From next month, vehicle owners will have the choice of installing a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag on their windscreens instead of conventional registration stickers.
The new-generation registration tags are being offered by the Land Transport Department under its Smart RFID Project, in an effort to use technology to enhance its services to the public.
The department's director-general Chairat Sanguancheu said the project would provide Smart RFID registration tags at a cost of Bt120, which would be additional to the normal cost of annual registration fees.
Smart RFID registration involves both a Smart Tag and a Smart Pass. A technical advisor to the project, Namchoke Somapa, said the Smart Tag was a new-generation annual vehicle-tax label that came bundled with an RFID chip with a memory capacity of 64 kilobytes. This will hold details of the vehicle model, colour, registration number and expiry date and will be stuck, as usual, on the vehicle's windscreen.
The Smart Pass is an RFID tag that will be installed on the vehicle's headlights, and will bring the vehicle in direct contact with a new government RFID network designed to provide real-time information on a vehicle's whereabouts and identity.
Chairat said the network currently linked the Land Transport Department with the Department of Corrections and the Royal Thai Police, and there were plans to connect with other government agencies. It enables the departments to access and transfer information in real time.
In the first year, the Smart RFID project will install about 450 RFID readers on main roads around the country. They will be capable of reading the Smart Pass information from vehicles passing within 14 metres, at speeds up to 200 kilometres per hour. The readers will send information to a system centre in real time, keeping track of vehicles and monitoring their movements.
A car encountering any problems on the road will be instantly locatable.
Namchoke said the project expected to provide about 2 million Smart RFID registration tags out of Thailand's total of 22 million vehicles.
The project is planning future developments in which new services will be offered to Smart RFID users, such as e-claims, vehicle tracking, smart parking, real-time traffic monitoring, traffic planning and check points.
The new Smart RFID registrations will be available from August 11.