On a beautiful autumn morning a crowd had gathered in the Incident Room of the new Traffic Operations Centre (TOC) on Auckland’s North Shore. The invite list for the official opening was a ‘Who’s who’ of local politicians, dignitaries and transport stakeholders. They had come to witness the opening of a key new asset in the Auckland and national transport infrastructure.
There was, however, no cutting of the ribbon – this was a high-tech project and the technology was going to take centre stage. As Dr. Wayne Mapp, MP for North Shore, stepped up to perform the opening, the IT people in the room held their breath. He pressed the button on the touch panel and the darkened Control Room lit up with a bank of live camera images from across Auckland’s motorway network. I love it when a plan comes together!
Why the new TOC?
The TOC is the new home to the Auckland Traffic Management Unit (TMU), a partnership between the NZ Transport Agency and the Auckland Territorial Local Authorities. TMU is a ‘front line’ operation, carrying out monitoring, surveillance and optimisation of the Auckland and New Zealand State Highway network 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Previously these functions were spread across two premises in Auckland (in Queen St and another building by the Harbour Bridge). These facilities were outdated, and didn’t support the productivity and the TMU growth targets. They also presented several HR challenges, not least of which being the geographic separation of the team.
A key NZTA objective is to reduce the amount of time that State Highways are unavailable due to incidents, and improve the information provided to road users so that they can make informed travel decisions. The TOC is a key component of delivering on that strategy, with the new facility targeting up to $50 million per annum of economic benefit.
Schedule is king
The new TOC was delivered in record time (five months from shell to fully operational site) with the simple directive from Mark Walker, TMU Manager: "There is no down time – the TOC is always operational.”
A smooth transition was therefore critical and risk management paramount. NZTA led the TOC development and relocation programme to ensure that it was well established before the new Auckland Super City in October this year. A go-live target of 17th April was agreed. It was a very high-profile and visible date – one not to be missed lightly!
True Data/Voice/Video integration
The existing computer room was a classic legacy environment – a myriad of servers and switches, and a complex web of copper and fibre optic links to the camera network across Auckland. The strategy adopted by the IS team was to move the staff and keep the back end processing in the existing computer room during the transition. This required the installation of a private fibre LAN / Voice extension – 96 fibre cores across 6km along SH1 delivered by the Auckland Motorway Alliance (AMA).
The AMA also digitised all the existing motorway cameras. Migrating the cameras from analogue to a digital system provided a number of advantages, including allowing expansion of the CCTV coverage and supporting easier distribution of the video feed to different sites.
As Ian Leach of the AMA says: "The biggest challenge was ensuring that the migration of video from the analogue system to the digital system was carried out with minimal disruption to operations. This involved sending video streams to both old and new centres and migrating the camera control from the old to the new site.”
Zintel Cogent delivered the voice solution using the Aastra MX-One VoIP system and an Aastra Solidus eCare Contact Centre for the Control Room. An Omnitronics DX-64 radio interface provides integration between the telephony system and the radio systems that are used for communications. This system allows operators to switch between the telephone and radio networks while using a single wireless headset.
The TOC network core was delivered by Fusion Networks using the Allied Telesis SwitchBlade x908 advanced Layer 3 switches. The Virtual Chassis Stacking (VCS) provides a highly available system where network resources are spread out across two stacked nodes, thus reducing the impact of any one of the nodes failing.
Switch ports on different nodes across the stack are aggregated together to provide excellent high availability characteristics for the 16 directly connected 24-port gigabit Edge switches.
The Video Wall – the TOC Centre Piece
The video wall uses revolutionary video wall image processing technology to achieve the most advanced installation of its kind in Australasia.
The video wall solution comprises image processing hardware and software (Pixelnet by Jupiter Systems) and video wall displays (Margay II by Planar). Both are US based and are global leaders in environments where guaranteed 24/7 operation is a must.
PixelNet captures, distributes, controls and displays digital and analogue video sources. Based on technology previously used for data communication networks, PixelNet adopts Gigabit Ethernet and Ethernet switches for use with high resolution, real-time video.
Using packet-switching technology any information source can be shown on any display, as a window on a single display, or as a window spanning multiple display devices in a display wall.
The Margay II is a 50” full high definition rear projection cube, engineered so that only 0.7mm gap exists between cubes, giving virtually seamless images spanning multiple displays. The video wall is made up of 36 displays making the video wall images 13.2m wide x 1.86m high (24.8 sqm).
"This has been our most challenging and satisfying project to date. Being able to be involved in such a high profile one-of-a-kind project and be the first integrators of this technology in New Zealand is a real honour,” says Jake Male from Videopro NZ.
The final word from the IS team
"The last six months have been a very exciting and challenging time for the IS team. The ambitious timeline for the project has required a dedicated team of professionals who have worked tirelessly to produce a world class facility that will serve the current and future needs of both the NZTA and the TMU,” says Paul Demain, NZTA IS Technical Services Manager.
Pat Randles, is the founding Director of Ascendo, an IT consultancy which focuses on mission-critical IT Infrastructure and Telecommunications.