Barix’s Barionet IP devices have been fitted at four shipping ports in the country with a view to reducing load times and allowing ‘faster access’ to greater volumes of vehicle traffic.
The ports serve as a base for vehicle ships taking passengers to destinations in Estonia on the Baltic Sea and to surrounding countries such as Finland. According to Barix, traffic volume is ‘significant’ all year, and is especially high during the summer months. “This translated to traffic congestion and long delays for ticket and passenger validation when using the manual entry system at the port and onto the ships,”the company said.
ITvilla, an Estonian automation consulting and system integration company, installed the access points.
“The manual validation process for vehicles and passengers prior to driving onto the vessels proved very time-consuming,” said Neeme Takis, CEO of ITvilla.
Automated entry ticket validation and traffic management
“It was decided that automated entry ticket validation and traffic management of waiting lines would allow for more efficient access. The E-Port Project required an IP controller that could manage configuration data for all types of peripheral hardware, understand all communication protocols, and manage the entry and exit sensor behavior for multiple types of vehicles passing through the port.”
The Barix Barionet has been set up to provide both the physical and logical interface between the server and the peripheral devices, storing the periphery device configuration and driver software. It also translates the signals and commands between the peripheral devices and the server, offloading the server from device-dependent processing. They have also been set up to offload the server from tasks such as barrier closure decision-making, which happens after the expected number of vehicles has passed.
“The Barix Barionet controllers are the heart of the project, efficiently meeting all of the E-Port Project’s access and traffic management requirements,” Takis said. “The middleware based on Barix controllers features strong network management support, quickly finding and resolving problems with network peripherals, and remotely controls and monitors vehicles and their passengers. This results in vastly improved traffic management and vehicle flow even during peak volume seasons.”
Easy integration
There are a total of 16 Barionet controllers and Barix IO12 extension modules in each port. The controllers have been connected via a LAN, including an optical ring for the longest connections. The server is connected to the same LAN. The WLAN extension of the LAN enables control of the loading process from the board of the vessel, using PDA devices.
“The E-Port Project is a nice example of the flexible and cost-effective use of the Barix Barionet in infrastructure projects,” said Johannes Rietschel, CEO and founder of Barix.
“The open Barix approach provides Barix partners with easy integration and utilization of Barix product offerings. Integrators and project managers can quickly and easily build unique solutions for challenging installations. The ease of use, coupled with strong product functionality in remote monitoring and automated access control, enabled ITvilla to easily write a custom application on the Barionet controllers that operates reliably on our standard, cost-effective devices.”
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