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For Cintra, innovation in information sys- tems is the key to maintaining its status as a leading company in the toll road and parking sector, particularly in these diffi - cult times when cost optimization must go hand-in-hand with continued competi- tiveness in a market of new opportunities.

In a very short period of time, information technologies will change the way opera- tions are handled in the business world, but they will also be a decisive factor for winning new contract bids in which the technological component will become increasingly more important.

This section covers the progress made by Cintra and its concessions over the year 2008 in projects involving innovation in information technologies.

IT projects and innovation in the toll road sector

Consolidation of initiatives launched •

in previous years

In 2008, we have continued the jobs and expanded the scope of projects begun in past years.

Thus, in 2008 the second phase of fi eld tests for the DAVAO (Automatic Detection of High Occupancy Vehicles) system was conducted on the fast lanes or “electro- nic toll lanes” of the Madrid-Levante toll road. The project aims to develop a sys- tem capable of automatically identifying the number of occupants in a vehicle as it

passes through a toll booth.

High occupancy detection gives Cintra a competitive edge because it provides transport authorities with solutions to streamline the use of infrastructures using selective tolls in a quick, effi cient manner. Transport authorities around the world are looking for developers who can offer these kinds of solutions.

The DAVAO tests were conducted on multi-lane toll roads at test sites for Cintra concessions, and in the second half of the year a prototype of the product was installed on the Bus-High Occupancy lane of the A6 toll road in Madrid.

This project was carried out in coopera- tion with Indra, a company with which Cintra has signed an agreement to use and market the product resulting from the DAVO tests. Under the terms of this agreement, Cintra concessionaires will be able to use the system without any limitations other than the necessary adap- tations, and Cintra will receive royalties for every installation carried out by third parties as long as their activities do not compete with Cintra operations.

Finally, new installations of the congestion prevention and toll road management system Tollfl ow® were made in 2008. This is a powerful tool for optimizing tool road operations as it issues computerized alerts when traffi c congestion is detec- ted and stores information in a databank that is highly useful in planning toll area

services. The excellent results of the tests done at AUSOL have made it possible to install the system on the three main toll plazas of the Indiana Toll Road. This job was completed in late 2008.

Online verifi cation of credit •

card validity

Banking institutions have requested technology to prevent the fraudulent use of false magnetic cards to pay tolls. After completing a viability study with the companies that process card payments in Spain and with concessionaires, Cintra be- gan to develop a special system for card authorization that connect directly with bank databases to eliminate the problems caused by the off-line system based on sharing rejected card number lists.

After a period of testing to improve com- munications and validation protocols, the system was installed commercially in 2008 by the AUTEMA and AUSOL concessio- naires. The results of the system are very

2008

positive for the toll operators, because there are no time delays on transactions, and for banking institutions, because fraudulent use has dropped dramatically. This system is scheduled to be installed in other concessions and off-street parking facilities.

Planning and designing new •

electronic toll systems

The main projects undertaken in 2008 share the common denominator of free-fl ow toll collection – also known as electronic tolls – that do away with obstacles, toll lanes and booths altogether and main- tain the highway’s capacity.

The technology of the new free-fl ow toll projects is based on our extensive experien- ce operating the 407-ETR project, although the new projects are designed to suit different settings and incorpo- rate the new structures of the- se systems. The new projects broached in 2008 were the Norte Litoral Toll Road in Por- tugal and the SH-130 in Texas, where the basic functional analyses were carried out.

Cintra’s participation in international •

projects

In 2008, Cintra participated in two inno- vation initiatives that were promoted and fi nanced by the European Commission.

The fi rst was the RCI or “Road Charging Interoperability” project, which consisted of developing two on-board equipment prototypes that would work with sys- tems based on microwaves and satellite communications. Cintra participated in the project by testing the operative capacity of both prototypes in a toll plaza built for this purpose in the area of San Pedro de Alcántara at the AUSOL concessionaire.

The second project, known as CESARE IV, was aimed at defi ning the regulatory body for the future European tolling system. Cintra was asked to head up the fi rst of the work packages for this project, which involved reviewing the current na- tional and regional interoperable systems and defi ning the general conditions of the European system, determining the rights and obligations of each participant in the system. These conditions were agreed upon by all participants and presented to the European Commission.

IT projects and innovation in the parking industry

In 2008, Cintra has made the most of important opportunities to develop solu- tions that boast highly pertinent innova- tions.

In the project involving parking for custo- mers and the bus station at Expo Zarago- za 2008, Cintra developed an application for locating vehicles in large parking areas. This device uses an auxiliary car that records license plate numbers and matches them with GPS coordinates ob- tained by geo-positioning and translated into parking space identifi ers. In this way,

when a user wishes to locate his vehicle, he only has to enter the license plate number in the system and it will show where he is parked, with a slight margin of error. On this same job, we develo- ped an interactive management system for bus platforms, which permits online reassignments of passenger departure and arrival docks that are relayed directly to passenger information systems.

In the airport parking lots at Standsted (United Kingdom), Cintra has adapted its SENA (Parking Business Operations Sys- tem) applications and has linked up with an online reservations system provided by a British company. This same idea will be developed and adapted for use in Spanish airports where Cintra is the sole or joint operator of parking facilities.

In 2008, the metered parking areas of Al- cobendas (Madrid), Vigo and Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid) were equipped with a system for automatically identifying local residents using a small radio frequency device incorporated in the windshield permit stickers. This device automatically identifi es the vehicle correctly when a radio-frequency pen is held up to the windshield. This system has made it pos- sible to all but eradicate user fraud and provides occupancy data, which is useful for analyzing demand and managing available parking space.

When the metered parking system was launched in Vigo, a WiFi network was installed to serve as the basic commu- nications platform for an artifi cial vision system with street cameras. The primary purpose of these cameras is to help de- tect parking infractions, process incidents and record occupancy duration using an artifi cial vision system called “object video.” In the near future, the WiFi net- work on which this project is based will be used in other systems, such as the PDA devices used by parking attendants and parking meters.

2008

Projects for the technological standardization of management applications

With regard to management applica- tions, work on installing the THORS (Toll Highway Operation Reporting System) system in all Cintra-operated concessio- naires was completed, and the analytical management model for overhead was perfected.

The THORS system provides Cintra with reliable automatic reports on the ope- rating variables and parameters of its business activities and concessions such as traffi c, revenue and overhead. It also provides a summary of relevant fi nancial updates on its business interests and a scorecard module. The application is pre- sented to users in the form of a web page that can be accessed from the company’s Intranet.

The THORS application also offers a specifi c module for purchases based on the MM package in SAP, which has been implemented in trial mode on the Madrid Sur Highway (Radial 4) and the Madrid- Levante toll road (AP-36). The application allows the user to monitor the processes of acquiring goods and services from esti- mate requests to invoicing, and it also ties in with the corporate fi nancial application Fidelio.