SIEMENS

The Russian capital of Moscow and its surrounding area can be reached by air via five airports. One of them — Domodedovo International Airport — has become the largest and most rapidly expanding airport in Russia over the past few years. Between 2001 and 2007, passenger volume at the airport, which is located in the south of the city, rose from 3.8 million to around 18 million per year.
This increasing volume poses new challenges for the airport's parking lot management system. To tackle this challenge, airport management turned to Siemens. "We opted for a parking lot solution from Siemens because, in addition to enabling the expansion of the existing system, it provided parking lot users with a high level of security and convenience," says Dmitrij Ognev, project manager for Domodedovo Airport. Since November 2005, Siemens' Mobility Division has gradually installed state-of-the-art technology at three of the airport's large parking lots with space for a total of 2,400 cars. As a result, the airport now has the most modern and secure parking lot system in Russia.
One of the principal features of the Siemens solution is a license plate reading system. "This is one of the project's most innovative components," says Kirill Golovinski, who manages the project for Siemens in Russia. "It is without parallel in Russia and very few comparable systems can be found anywhere in Europe."
The system is equipped with three cameras. The first of these is an infrared camera that records the license plate numbers of entering vehicles. The camera can even read license plates when it's dark or when weather conditions are bad. Meanwhile, a second camera takes a picture of the driver, while a third films the entire vehicle, documenting its color, brand, and condition.
The data is transmitted via a broadband connection to a database, where it is stored. When a vehicle is about to leave the parking lot, the system compares the sets of data, allowing the driver to leave only if the car's license plate number and the number on the parking ticket match.
The images from the other two cameras' are also compared. "In this way, we were able to combat the previously frequent car thefts and manipulations of vehicle damage, which have since become more difficult and less common," says Ognev. "The new system is especially good at defeating the parking lot defrauders who secretly sold short-term parking passes to long-term parkers."
To make arrivals and departures more comfortable for those who use the parking lots frequently, Siemens incorporated a Hughes Identification Device (HID) — a contactless permanent parking pass system. Unlike normal parking lot users, airport employees and selected customers do not receive the usual paper ticket, but instead a credit-card-size permanent parking pass equipped with a transponder containing a 10- to 12-digit code number. On the basis of this ID, the airport assigns parking rights for particular spaces. Contactless reading devices for permanent parking passes have been set up at all parking lot entrances and exits. If a driver shows a pass in the vicinity of one of these devices, the data — for example, the number of the parking pass and the car's license plate number — are read and evaluated. If all of the data matches, the driver is allowed to proceed.

Secure Payments. By requiring the input of a PIN code, the solution for processing a credit card at an automatic payment machine also increases security. Here, the data is coded twice and sent from the airport to an associated bank. Third party interference is thus virtually impossible. Unlike the offline processes used by other providers, this system does not put the data into intermediate storage during payment, but instead processes the information, which it records with the help of fiscal printers. Incorporated into the payment machines, these printers contain a roll of paper for printing out receipts as well as a memory chip for recording all transactions. Such printers are needed so that the Russian internal revenue service can check all of the payment processes. "In the future, transactions will increasingly be handled in such online cash flows," says Svetlana Sabirova from the Siemens sales organization in Moscow.
Siemens' know-how and expertise will continue to be in demand at Domodedovo Airport. "It's very likely that Siemens' next order from Domodedovo will be for the parking lot for the buses and vans used in local public transport," says Andreas Schneider of Siemens Mobility in Berlin, who manages the project from Germany. "And the way things are looking at the moment, it probably won't be the last order either." That's because news of the parking lot system's success has spread throughout Moscow and beyond. In addition to two additional airports near Moscow, the city of Sochi, the venue of the 2014 Winter Olympics, has also expressed interest in high-tech access solutions from Siemens, which could also meet increased demands for security and help to fight crime.