Modern control room:
Old style control rooms:
Video surveillance and other control room operations are very useful, but only if, as the experiences shows, people are sitting in front of the monitors or large screen systems. New ergonomic command and control rooms of disaster management centres, homeland security centres, border control centres, security control centres, power plant control centres, network management centres, traffic management and surveillance centres, CCTV surveillance centres, security centres, police or emergency centres are assisting the attention of the viewers, deliver additional information, features and create connectivity to other systems.
We all know the times, where operators where sitting the whole night in front of a huge amount of glimmering small monitors which they should have under control and to launch alarms and to trigger provisions. Nowadays this changed in most cases, due to the fact that people are not made to stare for hours on unchanging images. Investigations have shown that viewers monitoring several monitors, already miss after 12 minutes around 45% of the information. Additional 10 minutes later around 95% of the information is not correctly recorded. The security sector has recognized this problem and with modern video-analysis and new applications alarms are generated, which generate alarms and display the related scenes on the main monitor of the control room (in general a large display system consisting of DLP cubes or LCD monitors). Enhanced algorithms have decreased the rate of false alarms. These features relieve the operators and strengthen the effectiveness of the control room. But not only the innovative video analysis systems and applications are important in these control centres also the use of advanced large screen systems is a key factor to improve productivity and effectiveness of the surveillance tasks. Another important factor is the 24/7 issue, this means that all the system have to be designed for 24/7 operation, the best solution would be to have redundant systems, when one component is failing, the redundant one is taking over. This should also applied for the large video screens and related systems. Today there is a huge number of large video screen and monitor manufacturers which cavort on the market. But only very few of them can offer integrated complete solutions dedicated for 24/7 with redundant features. For example a lot of manufacturers offer only the display, but not the controller, which is controlling the matrix of displays and the management software to administrate and control all the connected sources and processes. That makes it important to choose a manufacturer who offer a complete solution, composed of displays (DLP cubes or LCD monitors), graphics controllers and management software. Of course in such control room applications it is not possible to use displays from electronics supermarkets, because these displays have in general no optimizing features for 24/7. Image quality is also a key factor for a perfect control room environment. In order to give an added value and additional features to the large display systems, the so-called wall-management software is essential.
We all know the times, where operators where sitting the whole night in front of a huge amount of glimmering small monitors which they should have under control and to launch alarms and to trigger provisions. Nowadays this changed in most cases, due to the fact that people are not made to stare for hours on unchanging images. Investigations have shown that viewers monitoring several monitors, already miss after 12 minutes around 45% of the information. Additional 10 minutes later around 95% of the information is not correctly recorded. The security sector has recognized this problem and with modern video-analysis and new applications alarms are generated, which generate alarms and display the related scenes on the main monitor of the control room (in general a large display system consisting of DLP cubes or LCD monitors). Enhanced algorithms have decreased the rate of false alarms. These features relieve the operators and strengthen the effectiveness of the control room. But not only the innovative video analysis systems and applications are important in these control centres also the use of advanced large screen systems is a key factor to improve productivity and effectiveness of the surveillance tasks. Another important factor is the 24/7 issue, this means that all the system have to be designed for 24/7 operation, the best solution would be to have redundant systems, when one component is failing, the redundant one is taking over. This should also applied for the large video screens and related systems. Today there is a huge number of large video screen and monitor manufacturers which cavort on the market. But only very few of them can offer integrated complete solutions dedicated for 24/7 with redundant features. For example a lot of manufacturers offer only the display, but not the controller, which is controlling the matrix of displays and the management software to administrate and control all the connected sources and processes. That makes it important to choose a manufacturer who offer a complete solution, composed of displays (DLP cubes or LCD monitors), graphics controllers and management software. Of course in such control room applications it is not possible to use displays from electronics supermarkets, because these displays have in general no optimizing features for 24/7. Image quality is also a key factor for a perfect control room environment. In order to give an added value and additional features to the large display systems, the so-called wall-management software is essential.
Multiple benefits
The requirements of a control room team increase, for example firefighters want to see the position plan before the mission in order to see the details around the fire area to know with which dangers they must calculate and which equipment will be necessary. The chemical industry wants to know when they get an alarm message from the process control system where the problem exactly comes from. Images from cameras can facilitate decisions. Modern control rooms are using the possibility to use flexible controllable monitors in video walls to visualize CCTV images and other information.
Every time these are complex data from computing management systems, which are ergonomically visualized and adjusted to the absorbing capacity of the users, that they can work efficiently. The multitude of information must be displayed in a way that the operators can see immediately if something goes wrong, if any error appears or alarms are detected.
Nowadays it is also important to use large screen display systems which are able to accept multiple inputs. As IP video (streaming video) cameras are more and more used, but still analog cameras are used at the same time, also RGB or DVI sources as well as network sources have to be displayed on a large video screen. This makes it necessary that the manufacturer of the video wall is also having a controller which can accept this multitude of inputs at the same time without using additional external devices. The netpix controller series from eyevis is such a system accepting all the different source inputs.
The crisis case
The most important is a well organized presentation in a crisis case. In fact in emergency control centres the operators are normally only well-trained specialists, but in most cases they don’t have concrete knowledge of place, eventhough they must take decisions within seconds and have an overview on the situation with the available information and trigger the further steps by means of the deposited alarm plans. This is possible through integrated control rooms with intelligent software solutions. This starts with the graphical presentation. Big, high-resolution monitor walls, like offered by eyevis gives an overview on the situations, which can be seen by the operators in the control room, but also immediately by the management entering the centre. Additionally the directors of operation can get messages via SMS, email or directly on their desktop monitor at their workplace, which must not necessarily be inside the control room, it can be in the same building or even in other locations. This is also an advantage when teams of several control rooms have to collaborate in some cases.
Visual impact
As humans are very good in gathering information visually, therefore it is important to use display concepts and layouts where only important information is displayed, via alarm management in case of alarms, the for the alarm relevant information will be intruded or come in the foreground. So this means that not the quantity of displayed sources is important, but to have the relevant data available in a case of an alarm. In other words for example it is not necessary to view a camera image while nothing is happening, but it is better to have motion detection systems and when the motion detector is detecting something, automatically the camera image is launched and visualized on the large display screen.
The requirements of a control room team increase, for example firefighters want to see the position plan before the mission in order to see the details around the fire area to know with which dangers they must calculate and which equipment will be necessary. The chemical industry wants to know when they get an alarm message from the process control system where the problem exactly comes from. Images from cameras can facilitate decisions. Modern control rooms are using the possibility to use flexible controllable monitors in video walls to visualize CCTV images and other information.
Every time these are complex data from computing management systems, which are ergonomically visualized and adjusted to the absorbing capacity of the users, that they can work efficiently. The multitude of information must be displayed in a way that the operators can see immediately if something goes wrong, if any error appears or alarms are detected.
Nowadays it is also important to use large screen display systems which are able to accept multiple inputs. As IP video (streaming video) cameras are more and more used, but still analog cameras are used at the same time, also RGB or DVI sources as well as network sources have to be displayed on a large video screen. This makes it necessary that the manufacturer of the video wall is also having a controller which can accept this multitude of inputs at the same time without using additional external devices. The netpix controller series from eyevis is such a system accepting all the different source inputs.
The crisis case
The most important is a well organized presentation in a crisis case. In fact in emergency control centres the operators are normally only well-trained specialists, but in most cases they don’t have concrete knowledge of place, eventhough they must take decisions within seconds and have an overview on the situation with the available information and trigger the further steps by means of the deposited alarm plans. This is possible through integrated control rooms with intelligent software solutions. This starts with the graphical presentation. Big, high-resolution monitor walls, like offered by eyevis gives an overview on the situations, which can be seen by the operators in the control room, but also immediately by the management entering the centre. Additionally the directors of operation can get messages via SMS, email or directly on their desktop monitor at their workplace, which must not necessarily be inside the control room, it can be in the same building or even in other locations. This is also an advantage when teams of several control rooms have to collaborate in some cases.
Visual impact
As humans are very good in gathering information visually, therefore it is important to use display concepts and layouts where only important information is displayed, via alarm management in case of alarms, the for the alarm relevant information will be intruded or come in the foreground. So this means that not the quantity of displayed sources is important, but to have the relevant data available in a case of an alarm. In other words for example it is not necessary to view a camera image while nothing is happening, but it is better to have motion detection systems and when the motion detector is detecting something, automatically the camera image is launched and visualized on the large display screen.
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