French highway operator uses Microsens fibre optic solutions.
In addition to typical factory environments, industrial Ethernet is also used in traffic control, monitoring and signalling systems in the transport sector. One of the current focal areas is traffic monitoring applications, requiring large bandwidth and high availability.
The largest French highway operator, the ASF Group, has depended on the network hardware components supplied by Microsens for many years. ASF’s highway network provides routes to the most important economic region and one of the most important travelling destinations in Europe.
Spanning more than 3100 km, this network connects France with Spain, Italy and northern Europe. Maintaining optimal safety for the more than 30 000 vehicles that on average make use of the highways every day presents a big challenge to the operator and can only be achieved by means of infrastructure that is safe, sustainable and user friendly.
To implement this, the ASF Group counts on high-quality products and technology partnerships. Together with its integration partners, various large projects have been undertaken and Microsens solutions have been widely implemented in the large toll stations.
Originally, the toll stations were only equipped with PCs, but, during the course of modernising, the services had to be expanded significantly in the past few years. In addition to the typical control data for the access booms, directly connected by means of glass fibre converters, the pay machines and the video cameras have also been connected to the IP network. In one of the next expansion stages, integration of voice services by means of VoIP is planned. Special fast Ethernet industrial switches with glass fibre connections are used as their robust design makes them especially suitable for the harsh environment along the highways. The devices can be mounted on DIN rail and are installed directly in the electric distributors.
During the course of interconnecting the various toll stations, a fast, dedicated network structure had to be established. Targeted traffic management and control ensure a high degree of safety seven days a week at all times of the day and night. The ASF network is divided into 36 sectors, each covering 50 to 120 km of highway and connected to the seven regional administration centres by means of a ring structure.
These regional centres in turn ensure global coordination and are networked with the main ASF control and service centre in Vedène. To ensure reliable data transmission across such large distances, glass fibre is the only suitable medium.
The constant expansion of the network structures required the operator to look for an open transmission platform. The modular system offered by Microsens, with its large variety of electro-optic converters, met all these requirements. The data of the regional management centres is optically networked with the main control centre by means of Gigabit Ethernet glass fibre converters. Thanks to the extensive product range, the ASF Group was also counted on the competence of the German manufacturer to establish the long-distance connections.
Connecting the two locations at Agen and Avignon involved setting up data transmission across a distance of approximately 470 km, with data rates in the gigabit range. This has been achieved using special transponders with signal regeneration combined with optimised active optical technology.
The solutions that ASF implemented for optical data transport are customarily used by many European telecommunication providers.
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