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The long awaited EastLink freeway, scheduled for completion in November 2008 was successfully opened on 29th June, five months early. The freeway runs between Mittcham in Melbourne’s north-east, to Frankston in the south-east and is the culmination of a five year project. Approximately 40% of Melburnians live in this corridor, which includes important retail, commercial and industrial centres.

EastLink is the biggest urban motorway project undertaken in Australia to date. It consists of 39 km of toll motorway, including 1.5 km of tunnels, 84 bridges, 3 railway crossings, 8 pedestrian overpasses and 17 main intersections.

The Tolling System consists of 13 Tolling Points of 2, 3 and 4 lanes configuration with 76 lanes controlled an possibility to expand to a maximum of 126 lanes.

The Roadside equipment has been installed in a gantry designed, manufactured and commissioned by SICE. With some gantries with a length in excess of 30 metres, these are the world’s largest gantry beams ever installed in any multi lane free flow project.

The roadside information is managed by a software application (SICE TSMC) developed by SICE specifically for this project, and by an evolution of the SICE TOS successfully installed in previous Free Flow projects.

Moreover, the EastLink Free-Flow Tolling System is strengthened with an impressive cutting-edge IT systems architecture and hardware and software designed by SICE. Working closely with Thiess John Holland (construction) and ConnectEast (concessionaire), SICE has developed one of the world’s most advanced Tolling Systems.

Integrating technologies in the fields of Intelligent Transport Systems and Environmental Control Systems, the Toll System provided by SICE incorporates a full Back Office Computer System (BOCS) to process the on-road data collected, manual consolidation of faulty transactions, auditing, invoice generation, interaction with external charging agencies, infractions and traffic, as well as a full customer-service system based on the Internet, mobile-phone text messages, a telephone switchboard and personal attention. The system can accommodate in excess of 600,000 customer-service clients and process an amount in excess of 5.4 million transactions a day (contractual specification).

Having complied with all the technical requirements and finished five months earlier, Thiess John Holland rewarded SICE with a Bonus for Early Tolling Completion.

We can proudly say that SICE has delivered the world’s most advanced Tolling System within budget and five months ahead of schedule.