The Attika Tollway, a major ring road around Athens, can face acute traffic congestion, as a closed tollway within a metropolitan capital. A new CCTV system is a critical part of the road operator’s ability to keep traffic flowing smoothly and to meet a service level agreement to respond to any incident on the tollway within five minutes.
Before the upgrade, system operators were managing with a mixture of several non-unified systems. However, the age of the previous system meant that image quality was poor, the system was not expandable and it had reached its limit in the number of system operators working at the same time. There was no unified recording system for all types of camera; in some cases reviewing of recordings was slow. With local partner ILKA and project managers Attiki Odos, IP video products from IndigoVision replaced the analogue CCTV with an IP system. Based on SMS4, IndigoVision’s Security Management Solution there’s now one unified system open to unlimited multi-users. Some 355 traffic monitoring and toll security cameras are along the tollway, including 261 PTZ cameras and 94 fixed, with provision for cameras to be added. Attiki Odos Project Manager Sotiris Nikolakakos said: “The changeover to the IndigoVision system was managed without stopping the monitoring operation, and the whole upgrade ran smoothly. Operators now view video of excellent quality and the full tollway is monitored consistently.”
System operators can now watch multiple cameras per monitor, while the Traffic Management Center includes a large newly installed video wall running IndigoVision’s Video Wall software and showing multi-camera views of the motorway. Alerts from emergency phones are fed into the system, automatically moving PTZ cameras to pre-set positions and displaying alarms on PCs and alarm video on the video wall. There are 68 instances of Control Center, IndigoVision’s video management software, across the network, in the Traffic Management Center, toll plazas and other sites.
