The value of control rooms for modern issues

CONTROL rooms have been used to monitor and command critical operations in industries including healthcare, utilities, oil and gas, government, and higher education. These secure locations enable control room operators and leaders to gather and see information from multiple systems and places to make the most informed decisions quickly.

Now, with vastly more data coming in different formats, organisations are prioritising speed to gain a competitive advantage or react quickly to a crisis. This makes managing and deciphering the information coming in more challenging for control room operators today and in the future. However, they must still make the best possible decisions based on the insights derived from multiple sources including video and social media.

With the rapid expansion of urban areas, surveillance of the majority of city spaces is essential for public safety. Monitoring large areas is tedious and requires a lot of resources, and control room solutions offer an effective and cost-efficient way of keeping vast spaces in check. By providing real-time access to essential information, control room solutions can help break down barriers by removing location in the equation and empower decision-makers. These solutions will facilitate the development of successful smart cities and the transition to digital operations as well as enhance collaboration capabilities for organisations.

As more operations become cloud-based, organisations must utilise sophisticated visualisation and collaboration solutions in control rooms to monitor and command operations reliably, in real time and from anywhere.

With the emergence of mass production came a need to monitor and control equipment as well as assembly line workers. Then control rooms grew more complex as they became more essential to ensuring safety, conducting remote surveillance, and early detection and crisis management efforts. Artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies are helping control room operators by providing an overview of the entire network or system at any time, which is also enabling a shift from reactionary to pre-emptive management of critical systems. Monitoring operations at process control centres are possible from anywhere in the world without staff needing to visit warehouses.

Organisations are also optimising plant operations and enforcing safety protocols by leveraging control room solutions. For instance, using feeds from security and closed-circuit television cameras, production areas can be monitored from the control rooms. Non-compliance to safety procedures such as entering critical operation areas without protective gears can be immediately spotted.

RELIABILITY AND FLEXIBILITY

Control rooms are also making it possible for essential services - such as utilities, telecommunications, and healthcare - to fulfil the tremendous responsibility of bringing vital services to the public with no downtime. Governments can also protect national borders and turn smart city visions into reality by ensuring that command and control, traffic management and emergency operations centres have the highest quality images and access to real-time data from sensors and surveillance footage to control traffic patterns and minimise congestion, as well as respond quickly when disaster strikes.

For instance, Singapore's Intelligent Transport System is powered by an integrated and unified platform called i-Transport, which gathers, analyses and disseminates the information for traffic monitoring and incident management in the ITS Operations Control Centre. With real-time information, authorities can assist motorists and respond to incidents quickly, and share up-to-date traffic information with the public.

The pandemic is the latest example of why organisations around the world need sophisticated control rooms to ensure that critical operations can continue to run smoothly. As hospitals, emergency services and government agencies dealt with the peaks and troughs of Covid-19 cases, control rooms served as central intelligence hubs for many critical operations in monitoring and managing the pandemic. In Singapore, the National University Health System (NUHS) leveraged technology by deploying robots that monitor hospital public spaces and send reports to the control room to alert security officers on crowding and individuals accessing restricted areas.

The technologies, including audio visual and information communications technology, that need to be incorporated to achieve the level of oversight possible today requires a control room management suite that is network-focused, secure, industry-compliant, and has an open interface to enable the system to be flexible, versatile and scalable. The control room management suite also needs to allow operators to share video and data with remote decision-makers or communicate with response teams in the field to ensure that the right people receive the situational information they need quickly and securely.

To stay ahead of rapidly changing technology trends, control room operators need spaces that include all the hardware required to address current and future needs and be flexible to respond to changing business needs with end-to-end solutions and cutting-edge technologies. This flexibility, however, requires monitoring and integrating an increasingly complex web of information, which can challenge reliability. Modern control room equipment helps operators to collect, distribute and visualise various forms of data faster than ever.

Control rooms play an essential role in maximising operational efficiency, reducing risk, minimising costs, ensuring regulatory compliance and optimising business outcomes. Operating within mission-critical environments, modern control rooms enable productivity, minimise human errors, support faster resolution of incidents and help prevent asset downtime. Thus, companies looking to leverage control room solutions should not have to choose between reliability and flexibility.

• The writer is managing director of Barco S-E Asia and vice president, immersive experience of Barco Apac.