The public transport system is a crucial part of the Indian economy. Millions of people rely on it for commuting to their work every day. Rapid economic growth has led to a drastic rise in the number of vehicles on the road. From 0.3 million registered vehicles in 1951 to 0.2billion in 2015, the growth has been exponential and tremendous. Such huge numbers are hard to handle for the transportation infrastructure in the urban areas of the country. Traffic congestion is one major challenge that the authorities and decision makers are finding hard to tackle with today. To mitigate such traffic problems, one solution is the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS).
The is the most widely implemented methods of mitigation. It is a hypernym that subsumes traffic management solutions, public transport management, emergency management, etcetera. The Government of India has in recent years decided to work on policies to implement ITS in collaboration with a Geneva based road Federation Corporation. The standards laid down, would take care of several issues that infect the public transportation services.
AIS 140 is one among the guidelines that the Automotive Industry in India along with the Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI) has framed, under the ITS. Automotive Industry Standard 140 (AIS 140) is a set of standards published by ARAI (Automotive) for vehicle tracking system, camera surveillance system, and emergency request button.
The Government has directed all of the state public transport departments to make sure that all passengers using buses know and abide by the AIS 140 guidelines by 1st April 2018. To begin with, in order to adapt with AIS 140 guidelines, every bus will need to have a GPS tracking system, camera surveillance and an emergency button. This will help the department in tracking the bus in case of any emergency, and also enable the passengers to apprise the control room in case of any kind of mishap or other emergencies.
This guideline of fitting an emergency button and having the vehicle tracked by a GSP system must be followed by already-registered vehicles, and also by the vehicles that get registered here after. This implies that the automotive OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), along with aftermarket companies and Tier 1 suppliers need to have these systems ready.
Moreover, the vehicle health monitoring system will seek expertise of automotive embedded solution providers like CAN stacks, OBD Stacks, and J1939 stacks. Therefore, these providers will have to be configured and integrated in the vehicles. AIS 140 standard will also play a significant role in bringing the much-needed revolution in the transport industry. The incorporation of Advance Driver Assistance System (ADAS) and Augmented Reality (AR) in public transport vehicles will be expedited once this standard is implemented in its entirety.
With all of these information, it is quite obvious that the Government is certainly aiming towards Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) with the implementation of the AIS 140 standard for GPS being a building block. The need for the renaissance of innovation is thus being slowly felt and worked on.