In the post-7/7 era, robust planning is necessarily being developed to deal with any potential terrorist threat to the smooth running of the 2012 London Olympic Games. Central to these plans is the successful delivery of the C3i Programme, an ongoing project to revamp the communications structure of London’s Metropolitan Police Service (MPS).
C3i stands for Command, Control, Communication and Information, and is the name given to the improvements being made to the MPS command and control systems and the way in which the Met manages information.
C3i involves several different projects that ultimately aim to “optimise critical resources, efficiently provide and manage information and ensure greater resilience and police service capacity while ultimately improving safety for the public of London”.
At the heart of the C3i initiative is the consolidation of 32 London Borough Control Rooms (including one located at New Scotland Yard) into three new centralised and highly integrated Special Operations Centres at Lambeth, Hendon and Bow – both Lambeth and Hendon are operational, while the Bow Operations Centre opens later on this year.
The Lambeth Control Room – known within the force as ‘GT’ – used the 2007 London Marathon on 22 April as the first public event to test its facilities. The operation passed by smoothly. Lambeth will eventually handle over 500 public order events each year, including major sporting occasions in the Capital.
The main command and control floor at Lambeth has teams of between four and twelve computer-aided dispatch operators who communicate with police officers on the street by using airwave radios, and via the mobile data terminals in each police vehicle. This main space can also be divided into smaller ‘operations rooms’ to handle a major incident.
At either end of the main floor space are two vast video walls that allow for a large number of CCTV feeds and RGB computer image sources to be displayed for simultaneous viewing.
Gold Command: strategy time
Overlooking this main floor is Gold Command, from where strategic decisions are made during major incidents. Gold Command is in overall control of MPS resources at an incident and, from the Control Room, can formulate strategy for dealing with any occurrences.
Adjacent to the main floor is the CCTV monitoring suite where a total of 30,000 CCTV cameras feed into the system. Under the control of command officers, the CCTV suite staff select which images are displayed on the main video walls, in the format best suited to meet the needs of the operation(s) in progress.
A project of this scale throws up a number of important Control Room specification issues. A key objective of the Lambeth Control Room System Design Team was to overcome any potential problems and deliver a system that yields best performance as well as client satisfaction. In turn, there were a number of factors that had to be considered:
– the ability to show a large number of CCTV images simultaneously – and in the best resolution possible – was critical (often, systems claiming to show many CCTV sources can have severe performance limitations);
– the user interface was also an essential consideration – it had to allow rapid selection of a wide variety of display formats in an easy-to-understand way;
– also critical was the visible resolution and the absence of scaling artifacts – many of the applications have single pixel text and map lines, and the MPS didn’t want either to lose lines, or have blocky images visible from the console positions;
– while recognising that the display system would have connections to many other IT systems, the MPS was concerned that such connections would not have an adverse effect (for example, by slowing down performance, propagating viruses or compromising security) – the MPS required assurances that later expansion of the system could be achieved with low incremental costs and negligible increase in infrastructure cost.
Single, user-friendly system
This project is notable for integrating all of the Lambeth command and control technology alongside telephony, radio and data systems into a single, user-friendly system. To accomplish this, the initial task for the project team was to understand what the client wanted and then engineer a solution to achieve this from currently available technology. This all had to be achieved in a relatively short timescale, while ensuring quality control standards were not compromised.
Alongside main contractor Endeleo, Electrosonic provided technical support during the design phase as well as rack-build for the video wall control and signal distribution equipment. There are a number of benefits to this approach: the systems are built in a controlled environment, with full and proper testing conducted prior to installation. This ensures that all systems are fully compliant with safety and statutory regulations (such as the various EMC directives).
The choice of VN-Quantum(TM) as the image processor addressed the main issues raised in the specification. It was selected for its ability to show a large number of real-time video sources. The combined installed capacity of the MPS walls is 192 video images and seven RGB images. VN-Quantum(TM) deals easily with the large number of video sources required by the MPS and, in fact, allows for considerable later expansion, with the simple addition of one or more extra input cards.
An important point to understand is that all sources are maintained at full resolution, both in respect of colour depth and frame rate. Each VN-Quantum(TM) output card can display up to 64 images simultaneously, showing complete or partial images in any required composition across the displays. This affords the MPS Control Room operatives huge flexibility in terms of image display choice.
VN-Quantum(TM) accepts video and computer feeds and, under instruction from the operator and/or external interfaces, formats them into window layouts on each display after the necessary source switching and scaling.
The most important issues for the controller are the number and type of inputs and, critically, the number that can be displayed simultaneously without affecting performance.
Many controllers now embrace feed delivery over IP networks. There are several benefits to this, not least the use of structured cabling. However, compatibility with standards needs close scrutiny – an MPEG encoded by one manufacturer’s product may not successfully decode on that of another.
Side-step virus checkers
Hardware separation between the MPS networks and the controller can enhance reliability and performance of the system. It side-steps the need to run resource-hungry virus checkers and risk corruption of the system by errant PC applications loaded on the controller. It also absolves the maintenance staff from supporting a unit that contains specialist hardware and drives.
The rest of the display system is associated with operation interfaces and interaction with other systems. The operator interface must be as straightforward as possible and, in this case, control of the VN-Quantum(TM) system is seamlessly integrated into user interface software developed by Frequentis.
As the network and integration with further camera installations grows, the display system may need to grow too. This needs to be borne in mind at the specification stage.
The number of video feeds that need to be displayed both now and during the anticipated life of the facility will change. However, as things stand, C3i and the success of the new command and monitoring rooms is a huge step forward for all London 2012 planners.
