Privacy‐preserving electronic road pricing system for low emission zones with dynamic pricing

• Published in: Security and communication networks Vol. 9; no. 16; pp. 3197 - 3218
• Main Authors: Jardí‐Cedó, Roger, Castellà‐Roca, Jordi, Viejo, Alexandre
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Hindawi Limited 10.11.2016
• Subjects: dynamic pricing; Dynamical systems; Dynamics; electronic road pricing; Electronics; Fraud; low emission zone; Pricing; Privacy; Roads; security; Toll roads; vehicular ad hoc network
• ISSN: 1939-0114; 1939-0122
• DOI: 10.1002/sec.1526

The high levels of pollution and traffic congestion present in almost all major cities around the world have brought solutions such as the deployment of electronic toll systems in some of these cities. The main purpose of those electronic toll systems is to restrict the access of vehicles to certain city areas, named low emission zones. Since its adoption, this solution has proven to be quite promising. However, current proposals are still far from being ideal. More specifically, current schemes still introduce a significant error percentage in the detection of fraudulent drivers. Moreover, they usually require toll systems to be equipped with cameras that take pictures of all the vehicles that pass through the control points. This behavior may represent a serious privacy threat for the drivers. In this article, a new electronic toll system is proposed. The aim of the new proposal is to detect fraud while preserving drivers privacy. More concretely, it provides a non‐probabilistic fraud control, and the control points only take pictures of the vehicles that misbehave. Last but not least, the proposed system applies an enhanced dynamic pricing that can help the authorities to better distribute traffic over the road network. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. New electronic road pricing system for low‐emission zones that follows a dynamic pricing approaches independently foreach road stretch and offers an efficient distribution of the traffic. This scheme provides a non‐probabilistic fraud control, and it is designed to preserve the privacy of the drivers who behave honestly. Fraudulent drivers are photographed at control points and punished at a later stage.