Heathrow Airport has one of the busiest car parking infrastructures of any airport globally. With 14 public carparks handling up to 50,000 vehicle movements and 1000 intercom assistance calls per 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 brand new centralised control and management system to be housed in the newly completed T2 Queen Elizabeth II Terminal building parking control centre. It was a natural choice as Intelico 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 entire 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 existing control room in T5 suffered from issues with insufficient bandwidth to stream video feeds reliable and quickly from the 100’s of cameras across the airport which was incurring disproportionate 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.

Challenge

Centralise and streamline the management of up to 1000 customer help requests per day from intercoms on carpark barriers and pay stations across Heathrow Airport whilst also addressing bandwidth issues experienced in the existing parking control room.

Solution

Create a customised version of 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 seamless management platform with control of barriers and pay stations. Six control desks complete the control room environment.

Benefits

Powerful core architecture ensuring a fast system response even under high demand.

A custom, intuitive interface to reduce training requirements and call times whilst 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 one time.

Multiple existing systems integrated into one interface presenting details of the call location with a real-time feed from the nearest cctv camera checking against pre-booking data via ANPR, saving up to 3 minutes per call handled. Considerable bandwidth reduction and cost saving via innovative streaming compression.

View live video at any of 6 control desks simultaneously during a call from any one of the 500 help points across the airport using just the Chrome? browser and Intelico’s cutting edge streaming technology.

Core service hosted in a local virtual server providing immediate failover maximising up-time within this business critical environment. The efficiency of the Intelico design specifications are exceptionally low for a system with this capability – 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.