Case Studies

Airport parking control room

by msecadm4921

Heathrow Airport has one of the busiest car parking infrastructures of any airport. With 14 public carparks handling up to 50,000 vehicle movements and 1000 intercom assistance calls each day, the parking contractor, Apcoa, decided to explore better ways to manage such high and growing volumes of traffic, customers, equipment and services.

So they approached bespoke technology solutions company Intelico to build a new centralised control and management system to be housed in the newly completed T2 Queen Elizabeth II Terminal building parking control centre. Intelico says that it had already built and deployed a new ANPR engine for the airport as well as creating custom built software to integrate the Avigilon VMS into Skidata’s booking and access control systems.

The new control room would need to be able to integrate and communicate with parking equipment across the estate including barriers, pay stations, ticket machines, intercoms, pre-booking systems at each location and combine the key elements into a single interface, all accessible via multiple operator desks.

The control room in T5 suffered from insufficient bandwidth to stream video feeds from the hundreds of cameras across the airport, which was incurring heavy data costs. Each system also had a separate display and control set so meant operators were spending extended periods of time handling calls due to switching between multiple systems and screens for each process. Installed were Intelico’s Smart Alert platform to integrate intercoms, access control equipment and CCTV feeds (including Commend, Skidata, Avigilon and Pelco) in a virtual environment connecting more than 500 physical devices in a management platform with control of barriers and pay stations, used at six control desks.

A custom, intuitive interface reduced training requirements and call times while boosting operator and management efficiency and visibility. Previously handling multiple screens to assist with each enquiry required individual and in-depth training on multiple systems with up to five displays in use at a time.

Multiple systems integrated into one interface now present details of the call location with a real-time feed from the nearest camera checking against pre-booking data via ANPR, saving up to three minutes per call handled. An operator can view live video at any of the control desks simultaneously during a call from any one of the 500 help points across the airport using the Chrome browser and Intelico’s streaming product.

The core service is hosted in a local virtual server providing failover, maximising up-time within this business-critical operation. A single 4 core Xeon with 8GB ram runs at 10% load at peak time.

Operators receive estate wide notifications showing call queue, event information and RSS feeds. In-call the operator is presented with the local device video feed, Skidata barrier and pay-station access controls with the ability to enter information as required for that action, all recorded for inclusion in custom reports.

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