With the additional influx of fans attending the recent Soccer World Cup certain to put a strain on major urban infrastructures — and particularly transportation —various host cities took the opportunity to invest in upgraded operational and crisis management centres.

However, to maximize investment, many were looking way beyond the tournament at a flexible legacy system; this underpins South Africa's arrival on the world stage, with the investment of billions of rands not only enabling the country to host a world-class tournament but also to kick-start a massive boost for development.

International engineering, management and technical services company Aurecon was given responsibility for the design, systems development and integration, implementation, training, staffing, operation and maintenance of the new facility, creating a solution which allowed the City to efficiently resolve public service requests especially during the largest event on the international sporting calendar in 2010.

The company successfully took the complete solution from concept to procurement and implementation within a tight 4-month timeframe.

Sub-contracted to supply, project manage and fit-out the TOC technical infrastructure — including the new media wall, control and networks — was the local office of Dimension Data.

To achieve maximum visual acuity and reliability over the arduous duty cycle, Dimension Data chose for the hub of the operation a 2 x 2 Christie Entero LED videowall comprising four 50” cubes with custom-configurable TVC-1110 display wall manager.

The Christie Entero is the world's first LED-based SXGA+ and WUXGA resolution projection display system, purpose built for control room and videowall applications. The single-chip DLP product line features a ‘zero maintenance’ design, with the LEDs rated at 60,000 hours to provide almost seven years of dependable operation.

With 600 ANSI lumens of brightness, the Christie Entero LED projection engine comfortably illuminates Christie's display cube platforms, which themselves feature superior cross prism optical screen technology for higher brightness and wider angles of view. In addition, sealed optics eliminate the need for dust filters, and innovative ‘heat pipe’ cooling technology minimises audible noise.

CCTV cameras, spread throughout the city, were used to monitor traffic flow and incidents, while the TOC Microsoft Unified Communication infrastructure allowed remote communication back to the TOC, either by voice, live messaging or video.

All the while, the Call Centre was working flat out — answering everything from questions about the transportation system to directions to the stadium. “We were also able to monitor the calls on a dedicated section of the Christie wall,” stated Brian Fick, Practice Manager Interactive Media, Dimension Data.

In addition, Aurecon confirmed that several integrated hardware and software components supported the solution, including unified communications, resource tracking, biometric fingerprint keyboards, desktop workstations, multimedia wallboards, servers and handheld PDA smartphone devices. 
 
A virtualised server environment was created on which to host the solution platform, which included ESRI ArcGIS mapping and tracking services, Microsoft Unified Communications services, and Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
 
Via the latter, users could capture, update, and view all facility statuses, incidents, complaints, notifications, service request information and other electronic feeds such as resource tracking data and CCTV feeds, while the ESRI ArcGIS mapping and tracking services, embedded in the SharePoint site, enabled the viewing and updating of information geo-spatially.

The tight implementation supervision exercised by Aurecon and Dimension Data resulted in the opening of the TOC one week prior to the World Cup, and subsequently two project extensions: the Host City Call Centre and Host City Joint Operations Centre (JOC).

 “From placing of order for the Christie videowall until the June14th deadline was just six weeks,” confirmed Brian Fick.

Much of it had been made possible by both local and international support from Christie themselves, he said, as the company flew in personnel to assist with the installation, in addition to local support provided by Phil Lord, Christie's South African-based independent sales consultant.

Although Dimension Data have widespread experience of Christie technology and service support through its various locations, this had been the local office’s first encounter with the brand. And a successful one it was too. “The level of Christie’s performance and reliability, reported elsewhere in the Group, gave us all the confidence we needed and ensured that no further product evaluation was necessary.” 

The overall Aurecon Solution provided a successful multi-agency platform to assist in resolving incidents, complaints, and other service requests in an efficient and integrated manner.

Jacques Joubert, Solutions Architect/ICT Project Leader, Associate, Aurecon, stated that the solution design was based on taking legacy into account as well as providing flexibility and growth “to assist other departments to build on and improve the service delivery that the municipality provides to the public.”

Now that the World Cup is over NMBM’s next decision is how to redeploy the system — either in its present location or forms part of a joint operation centre.