Meyertech provides a "fundamental change in airport video surveillance" at Cork Airport

Introduction

In the first quarter of 2015 Meyertech completed the modernisation of Cork airports video surveillance system which went ‘live’ on March 23rd.

Cork Airport is the international gateway to the south of Ireland and is uniquely positioned at the start of the Wild Atlantic Way and Ireland’s Ancient East. It is the country’s second largest and busiest airport after Dublin and with more choice than any other airport outside of Dublin. Cork Airport serves an average of 6,000 passengers per day, rising to 15,000 in the peak season and has more than 2 million passengers travel through the airport each year, flying to top destinations across the UK and throughout continental Europe. Cork Airport’s customer service (as voted by passengers) has won national and international awards.

The modernisation of the airports video surveillance system was significant for daa and for Meyertech.

Conor O’Driscoll, the airport’s IT Business Relationship Manager takes up the story. “The new terminal in Cork was designed in 2003/04 and went live in 2006. So the CCTV system was quite dated.”

In the latter part of 2014 Cork airport made a fundamental decision to move away from its traditional ‘black-box’ based CCTV system.

It took this decision:

• To make use of its recently rolled-out virtualised IT platform.
• To move to a system which has a defined sustainable upgrade path to enable Cork to benefit from new technologies as they become available?
• Based on the lack of resilience its current system provided.
• Due to the inflexibility of its current CCTV system.
• When it identified a system which offers a more cost effective solution all round.
• To move away from propriety systems and onto an open-platform based system.
• To achieve its goal of converging CCTV maintenance and IT into a consolidated support service.

Cork Airport's vision

One of Cork Airport’s main objectives was to leverage its existing backend infrastructure and equipment by moving the CCTV system onto its IT infrastructure and virtualised platform. By doing this it realised that not only would it save significant cost in infrastructure but also it would reduce on-going support and maintenance costs.

FUSION-Eclipse can be integrated with other ONVIF technologies including analytics & access control

Additionally, by moving to an ONVIF Video Management Software (VMS) platform providing an open standard IP solution a vast choice of equipment and integrated systems become accessible to the end user which, is a fundamental game changer when Cork Airport wants to expand or refresh the system in the future.

Back to Conor, “From a technical perspective, we have gone from an older analogue propriety hardware and software model, which ties you into the supplier, to an open standard IP solution where the systems will communicate with each other more easily. This ensured a cost effective solution while also significantly improving the functionality and resilience of such a key operational system.”

FUSION-Eclipse

Meyertech’s FUSION-Eclipse Video Management Software (VMS) was chosen by Cork Airport to deliver its video surveillance system for the future, a system which ticks all the boxes now whilst also providing a base from which to build and add value in the future. Being ONVIF conformant FUSION-Eclipse is ready to be integrated with other ONVIF technologies including analytics, access control, building management and fire alarm systems.

FUSION-Eclipse is fourth generation VMS and most powerful to date and importantly still the easiest VMS to use on the market.

Providing control of elements of security system from an intuitive easy to use GUI FUSION-Eclipse delivers the complete-package. ONVIF conformant Profile-S, innovative functionality, HD images, PSIM capable, resilient servers with fail-over and hybrid interoperability.

Graphical navigation

Site graphic navigation enables users to understand the area they are viewing which is fundamental to them performing their surveillance tasks. FUSION-Eclipse site graphics are clear and concise, pinpointing locations within buildings and open spaces assisting users to react and make decisions more quickly and efficiently. The level of detail within FUSION-Eclipse can be further enhanced with our 3D-orientation of buildings and open spaces.

A new way to store video

FUSION-Eclipse offers organisations the opportunity to migrate existing proprietary DVR and NVR systems to an ONVIF conformant unified security platform operating on a secure and resilient network infrastructure by utilising an organisation’s existing NAS, SAN and other enterprise-class storage to ensure data integrity and more efficient utilisation of storage capacity.

At Cork Airport the video is stored off-site in the same way cloud-based-hosted-video works. The only difference being is that the data centres are owned by daa.

Modern control room

As part of the modernisation a video wall was installed in Cork Airport Police Control room. The addition of the video wall will provide an invaluable overview of airport operations and act as a focal point for incident management.

The video wall is a resource which is used by the control room team to manage incidents, oversee events and develop a structured workflow by working more effectively together.

FUSION-Eclipse provides users with full control over the video wall facility by easy selection of cameras and changing of layouts to meet the operational requirement.

Layouts can be pre-configured to display different formats of visual media including PC graphics, VNC data and even HTML content as well as the primary function of displaying video streams.

Fundamental change

What Meyertech has achieved at Cork Airport is to rationalise video surveillance, including the legacy elements, into an IT centric service.

Daa were able to move away from a proprietary ‘black-box’ system to an IT centric system which they fully understand and have limitless opportunity to add value to and grow the system as they want it.

“What we have created is a new ‘blueprint’ for video surveillance systems,” says Stuart Meyers, the Managing Director of Meyertech. “In Cork Airport video surveillance is no longer a separate system it is simply part of the IT system and because Cork Airport's staff understand IT they no longer have to understand CCTV which means we are always on the ‘same-page’ when it comes to discussing the system, which is great!”

One immediate potential opportunity that FUSION-Eclipse offers (which was not possible with the old system) to Cork is the ability to provide its staff with mobile viewing capabilities.

With FUSION-Reach powered android tablets and devices mobile viewing is now a reality extending the reach of control room operations and providing Cork with the potential to explore new ways of working.

A final word from Conor, “The new system is a big step up for Cork Airport. It is more flexible and operationally intuitive to users. It also has a lot of extra functionality that we didn’t have previously which will facilitate the potential introduction of an Airport Control Centre in the future.”