Page 66 - Security Today, October 2017

Time for an Upgrade
Regional traffic management center makes move to new technology and new quarters
BWy Kevin Christopherson
hen a regional traffic management center in Washington state outgrew its building—as well as the size of its roadway monitoring sys- tem—the staff realized it was time not just for a physical upgrade, but a technological one, too.
The Washington State Department of Transportation (WS- DOT) built its first traffic management center to monitor and con- trol traffic in Seattle in the 1960s, adding others across the state over the decades, along with new detection devices and cameras as technology advanced.
One of those facilities, the Shoreline traffic management center, eventually outgrew its building. To allow the center to further expand, WSDOT built a brand-new facility dedicated to traffic management next door to the old building. With the larger building, WSDOT had the opportunity to upgrade the center’s technology offerings, and jumped at the chance.
“The traffic management center in the old building had about 40 monitors, and we were always trying to squeeze in more, for more camera views,” said Michael Forbis, ITS program manager for WSDOT.
WSDOT knew it wanted a video wall configuration on a larger scale than its previous facility, and looked at a few options, but the reality of a tight state budget shaped its choices.
Taking Stock of Options
“One option we looked at was a complete monolithic wall of projec- tion cubes or flat-panel ultra-thin bezel displays,” Forbis said. “We had the funds to do it, but we were concerned about future main- tenance costs. Sometimes companies can throw money in a savings
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pool for future repairs or upgrades, but the DOT is a state agency and can’t do that.”
This meant that as the displays in the monolithic wall inevitably needed replacement, WSDOT would have to find extra money in its budget to do so, or create an entire formal project to replace it instead of swapping out pieces as needed.
“We wanted a solution that we thought we could easily replace,” Forbis said.
The Technology Selection
For its operations room, WSDOT settled on a video wall comprising 90 NEC Display Solutions P463 46-inch monitors, each with a NEC OPS-PCIC-5WS video processor. The video wall is made up of three sections: left, center, and right, with the left and right sections canted in toward the center of the room by 30 degrees. In the center of the video wall is a 3x4 configuration of NEC X554-UNS 55-inch moni- tors, which measures more than 18 feet diagonally.
“The configuration we chose got us all the IP video and sequenc- ing we wanted; plus, we can replace the wall in sections for smaller amounts of money over time as needed,” Forbis said. “We can put individual images anywhere on the wall, or, with the ultra-thin-bezel panels, we can also get a giant picture for the entire room.”
The 90-monitor configuration was not originally planned. The initial contract proposed two 72-inch individual monitors in the cen- ter instead of the 3 by 4 configuration, and about 70 42-inch displays making up the video wall, but Forbis said that after his team looked more closely at the contract, they realized they had to pick a specific manufacturer to correctly space the monitors out on the wall.
“I picked the NEC P463 and gave it to the CAD [computer-aided
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