June 14th 2013 Sanef ITS has been awarded the contract for renewing the IEA (Information Exchange Agent) interoperability hub in Ireland. The French company, which was formerly CS ITS until it was acquired by the Sanef group in October last year, is a leading designer, integrator, and operator of smart tolling systems. Sanef ITS submitted the winning proposal and has signed the final contract with the Irish National Roads Authority (NRA), which will see the company manage the complete systems integration and then operate it for five years, with an option for four additional years. The Sanef group is already well established in the country, with its Sanef ITS Operations Ireland subsidiary currently operating the M50 Free Flow tolling system. The company (as CS ITS) supplied the complete toll system in 2008, which is composed of a free flow gantry architecture and a full back office suite to deal with transactions and customer accounts. The M50 Dublin ring road is the busiest Irish road, with more than 110,000 vehicles passing through it each day.
The new project, named IMSP (Interoperability Management Services Provider), supports the supply of a new system to manage electronic toll payments from one toll operator to another. Sanef will deploy its FastToll Interop hub system, enabling customers to use any road and any Irish toll system with a single tag and a single invoice. One of the breakthrough achievements of the new system is to be EETS (European Electronic Toll Service) compliant, implementing the ISO12855 standard. The EETS 2004/52/EC directive is the first step to achieving full toll tag interoperability throughout Europe. This makes the National Roads Authority (NRA) the first authority in Europe to provide an interoperability hub that is fully EETS enabled.
