Municipal safety and security integration
Located 24 km (15 mi) north of Dallas, the city of Plano, Texas, sought a centralized management platform that could bring together its disparate security systems, including the ever-changing number of city agency participants. The city deployed a comprehensive PSIM solution to upgrade and modernize security systems in city buildings and facilities. Existing investments in security technology were leveraged to avoid the rip-and-replace approach.
The solution provided enhanced safety and security for citizens, enabling the city to collaborate and share resources with multiple city agencies in real-time for more effective responses to emergency situations. Plano is now able to integrate and manage all data from its security systems, devices, and collaborating city agencies to enable command center operators to easily distribute information to decision-makers for improved situation management.
‘Situation management’ is a more holistic view of incident information than ‘alarm management,’ which is more typical within the security industry. As opposed to viewing each piece of alarm data independently, situation management combines and correlates information from multiple alarm and data sources to provide a broader view of the overall ‘situation’ versus an individual alarm. This broader view of a situation provides a more intuitive and informative solution for managing incidents and crisis-type events.
Large-scale security system integration
At a large, Middle Eastern international airport, 12 new operations centers were constructed and integrated. PSIM/crisis incident management systems were installed for emergency event management and optimized situational awareness. These emergency event management features provide expanded capabilities for the assignment, tracking, and communication of manpower and assets during crisis/emergency situations.
These systems were also interfaced with local emergency response organizations for sharing of incident information and combined event notifications. Each control center was equipped with a number of dedicated PSIM workstations for use in daily security event management and during crisis situations.
This project included the integration of many disparate systems into the PSIM environment, including:
- telephone;
- geospatial mapping;
- records management;
- e-mail;
- automatic vehicle locator;
- access control;
- video;
- global positioning system (GPS) transponder sources;
- emergency dispatch;
- perimeter intrusion detection;
- radio; and
- airport operations database systems.
Return on investment (ROI) of labor savings
At a well-known global broadcasting company, 13 existing security control centers located throughout England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland were consolidated into one primary security control center. All security-monitoring activities for facilities throughout the United Kingdom are now managed from a single location.
The project included the design and deployment of a comprehensive PSIM software solution to integrate all security subsystems into a common operating platform for unified control and enhanced event management and monitoring functionality. The PSIM solution integrated the following systems:
- access control;
- intrusion alarm;
- video surveillance;
- intercom;
- radio; and
- fire alarm.
These individual systems were integrated to enable the full decommissioning of the existing security control centers, and the relocation of alarm and event monitoring activities to primary and secondary control centers. The ROI of labor savings achieved through this consolidation of monitoring activities took just over one year and drove the financial business case for the project.
