Driver licensing operations get a boost with new smart centre in Dubai

Dubai: Dubai has launched a Licensing Intelligent Operations Centre (LIOC) to oversee the sections of Drivers Licensing Operations, Vehicles Licensing Support and Smart Monitoring Centre.

Mattar Mohammed Al Tayer, Director-General, Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors of Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), and Abdullah Mohammed Al Basti, Secretary-General of Dubai Executive Council, recently launched LIOC. They toured the Smart Monitoring Centre and heard a briefing from the CEO of the Licensing Agency, Abdullah Yousef Al Ali, about the centre that monitors the performance of licensing service providers in Dubai. It covers 28 vehicle testing centres and 19 branches of vehicle driving institutes besides monitoring commercial activities and heavy trucks remotely. The centre has ten systems that support remote smart monitoring and inspection operations. These systems relate to vehicle safety, sensing of theoretical training rooms, drivers training, commercial licensing, vehicle rental, geographic tracking, electronic licensing, centricity of technical testing, camera management and measuring weight and dimensions of vehicles on the move.

The centre aims to improve transport and traffic safety and reduce accidents and fatalities by strengthening the management of driving institutes and enhancing the environmental sustainability of transportation by intensifying the monitoring of vehicle testing centres.

Smart monitoring

Mohammad Nabhan, the director of Licensing Activities Monitoring, conducted a briefing on the operational efficiency of the smart monitoring centre, which has seen 100 per cent improvement between 2017 and 2020 and the improvement rate is set to further shoot up to 400 per cent by 2023. The briefing also stated that the number of testing centres and driving institutes covered increased from 34 in 2017 to 45 in 2020 and the number is expected to reach 53 centres and institutes by 2023. Likewise, the number of surveillance cameras jumped from 629 in 2017 to as much as 1,116 in 2020 and will reach 2,150 cameras by 2023. The daily inspection operations rose from 35 inspections in 2017 to 425 inspections in 2020 and the number is anticipated to reach 5,000 inspections by 2023.

The plan envisages the introduction of the Robotic Monitoring Inspections System, which links CCTVs with big data systems fitted with automatic notifications. It also involves using artificial intelligence to analyse camera footage without human intervention. The aim is to enhance operational governance through the Video Automation Management System, and link with more than 2,000 surveillance cameras to expand the scope of the remote monitoring.

Customer experience

Al Tayer and Al Basti also attended a briefing about the drivers licensing system, presented by Mansour Al Falasi, director of Drivers Licensing.

The briefing covered the current and targeted performance indicators aiming to reduce the time of signing-off testing complaints from one day to two hours, increase the compliance of driving institutes with the practical training from 67 per cent to 80 per cent, raise the compliance with smart registration of trainees from 58 per cent to 80 per cent, boost the compliance with daily testing plans from 90 per cent to 95 per cent, and reduce the response time to road testing emergencies from two hours to 10 minutes.

Al Tayer and Al Basti also reviewed the data mind mapping of driver’s licensing department, which includes 14 million logs per day and the future expansion plan up to 2024. The plan includes upgrading the smart yard testing of drivers, analysing data by automated processes, launching an interactive testing platform, adopting self-managing processes powered by artificial intelligence technologies and the Internet of Things, introducing a unified driver testing system and launching the smart yard testing for heavy vehicles.