Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine Bridge-Tunnel

Case study

Efficient visualization of video and SCADA

“At that point in time, we evaluated different control room visualization providers, but Barco was able to provide us with a universal decoding solution that can process large amounts of streaming video from different encoder suppliers with minimal latency.”

The Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine Bridge-Tunnel, connecting the Island of Montreal with the south shore of the river at Longueuil, Quebec, absorbs some 130,000 vehicles a day along 6 busy traffic lanes. A central control room, manned by 2 operators on a 24/7 basis, is monitoring each traffic movement.

In an effort to increase tunnel safety and implement the north-American NFPA502 (National Fire Protection Association) regulations, the Quebec Ministry of Transportation decided to upgrade the current control room and associated camera infrastructure.

Technical challenges
Mrs. Mervat Azer Tannous, project manager at the Quebec Ministry of Transportation: “The central control room actually needed to monitor the traffic surveillance camera information, as well as the SCADA information from the tunnel’s ventilation systems, generators, gas analysis, fire protection systems, etc. So, all these different types of sources needed to be visualized efficiently.”

“In our previous control room, we managed around twenty sources. Now, as we were planning to increase the number of traffic cameras, we had to monitor about 46 sources.”

An additional challenge was the different types of sources that needed to be visualized to the control room operators: “In the two parallel traffic tunnels, one in each direction, we use digital cameras. In the service tunnel, which is also used as emergency and fire exit, we have analog cameras.”

A universal decoding solution
Barco provided a video wall consisting of 4 67-inch projection modules, including video wall controllers with integrated streaming video cards. These universal decoders are capable of decoding digital video streams from multiple manufacturers and across multiple standards.

Mrs Tannous explains: “Choosing for Barco's streaming video solutions was a matter of cost-efficiency, because it reduced our investment for specific decoder hardware, taking into account that the price of a decoder ranges from 1,000 to 4,000 dollar each. Additionally, a universal decoding solution allows us to efficiently co-operate with other control rooms throughout our large jurisdiction, no matter which type of video compression algorithm is used.”