911 Central Command Center Mecca, Mecca, KSA

Opportunity

To provide the biggest and state-of-the-art security centre for the most important public institution in Saudi Arabia, the Central Command Center Mecca of Mecca (911 Center).  This is a critical centre used to provide a centralized command that requires unified control over multiple audio-visual setups.
 
The requirement of the client, Ministry of Interior of Saudi Arabia in the association of the Ministry of Finance is to have the most modern centralized area to monitor activities and equipment which was very crucial.
 

Background and Challenges

The Control Room is designed to monitor, analyze the data and videos streams and take a decision on the best approach to deal with critical scenarios. Thus the video walls should have the ability to displayed captured VMS from operators which will be getting streams from around 20,000 cameras.
 
The client requested a reliable and stable hardware-software video wall system being able to accommodate the number of incoming streams with almost zero-downtime.
 
As for the customized technical furniture, the urgency of the client to have the project implemented made GESAB to work on the conceptualization and execution in a very short period of time. Moreover, the large number of operators and functions of the various rooms complicated the ergonomics design of each control room.
 

Solution

In order to meet up with client requirement for minimum downtime and virtually a zero maintenance video wall system; the control room was equipped with 160 state-of-the-art Mitsubishi LED DLP Cubes forming two identical video walls in a 20 wide by 4 high arrays of 72inch DLP cubes with a curvature of 5° angle.  Each cube has WUXGA (1920x1080) resolution. The viewing of the video wall is 31m wide x 3.876 high a total of around 120m² and with a total resolution of more than 184 million pixels. The expected of the light source is of 100,000 hours around 11.3 Years. The brightness of the cubes is around 860cd/m². In addition, each cube is equipped with a highly efficient air cooling system with no moving parts thus no required replacement and long service life. 
 
Each one of the two 80 cubes video walls was equipped with 80 mini-pc driving the video to the DVI input of the cubes. The processing has a decentralized structure and each cube is equipped with its own embedded pc that is linked with other over the network and thus eliminating the use of a single controller or a single point of failure. Anyone of these mini-pcs is able to have a Master function thus in case of any Master pc fault another pc take over automatically that functionality and keep the system running reliable without restrictions. In addition, hundreds of captured streams from operator’s workstations are being displayed using the client software. The system provided full flexibility as it is able to capture any application running on the workstation and makes it available as an independent source. Thus virtually you don’t have a limitation on the number of inputs and outputs as it can add pcs for any additional output or inputs. The client software allows to view and place the content anywhere on the connected video walls. In addition to these useful tools, the control room was equipped with a chat function that allows operators to communicate with each other and sends live streams in between and not only to the video wall. 
 
In order to optimize the space with maximum ergonomics, we chose Gesab to create curves consoles for some of the control rooms while maintaining visibility of the 80 cubes video wall. Specific control consoles for group work and 8 operators’ capacity control desks were designed for this project.
 
Customization of all technical furniture offered the best solution to the requirements of the Ministry of Interior of Saudi Arabia, including visual ergonomics with Dataflex monitors arms and including the crisis management meeting room for the high ranks, optimized and automated with full equipment to supervise operations & manage any occurring crisis.
The large part of the technical furniture was supplied and installed by Martin Professional Middle East. Moreover, Martin Pro Middle East was the sub-contractor responsible for the systems along with the audiovisuals solution and technical furniture.
 

Products Used

Mitsubishi 72” LED DLP Cubes
Gesab Technical Furniture