The authors develop a unified approach to the substantiation of requirements for the automated traffic control system as a “measurement equipment - identification - vehicle traffic control” system. Studies show that to establish requirements for vehicle identification systems, it is reasonable to use a method for the substantiation of technical requirements and the evaluation of the performance of measurement equipment in automated vehicle traffic control systems based on multi-criterion optimization consisting in the selection of an optimal solution from a defined area of search. The developed method of the automatic vehicle identification system shows high performance for a detection system in real-time. Most previous papers were based on one method: method of template matching or neural network method, which is ideal for the detection of some types but not suited for the detection of others. © 2020 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the XIV International Conference 2020 SPbGASU “Organization and safety of traffic in large cities”