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Authors: Aitov V., Chekin I., Novitskiy V. Published in № 4(70) 31 august 2017 year
Rubric: Educational environment

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Access control system in a higher education institution

Access control systems (ACS) currently available on the market are presented as universal. Initially, they were developed without taking into account the specifics and problems of universities. Moreover, they are self-sufficient and can be deployed and implemented without any integration with the corporate information system (CIS) of the university. Many business processes of the university are built on the assumption that the ACS operates with actual data during the deciding on admission. The access system of the university when making a decision on admission should have up-to-date information on the financial balance of residents and students on a contractual basis, acting as a powerful tool that improves financial discipline, and reduces payment arrears. Development of the ACS as an integral part of the university’s unified information system is a relevant objective. The architecture of the ACS of the university in terms of software can be implemented as a centralized or distributed one. In a centralized architecture, the ACS software is installed on a dedicated server, in a distributed architecture — directly to controllers (microcomputers). The article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the centralized and distributed ACS architectures, it is shown that the developed ACS contains elements of both architectures. A library for reading electronic cards using the wiegand protocol is presented. The process of controlling the turnstile from the microcontroller point of view is described. The scheme of interaction of microcomputer and microcontroller is given. The mechanism of controller data synchronization with the central database is considered. The ACS presented in this article was introduced in 2013 and is now successfully used at the Moscow State University of Food Production, as well as in several other universities. At the moment of this article publication there are about 23 million records in the event log, 72 access control devices (turnstiles, auto barriers, electronic locks) are registered in the territorially-distributed system. Based on the results of its deployment, the management stated the increase in the efficiency of the university’s work in a field of personnel discipline, business processes integration, and time savings due to ease of use.

Key words

Access control system, ACS, integration of automated systems, 1C: Enterprise, university complex automation system, university unified information space.