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Key design considerations for a control room

If you are designing or upgrading a control room, or even reviewing or auditing an existing control room, there are a number of design factors that one would need to consider. They are typically incorporated into design drawings, but ideally, there should also be the use of mock-ups to evaluate the usability of the overall design, either practically or simulated on software.

Starting with a clean slate always makes for a better control centre or control room, as you can build the design considerations into them from the start. With an existing control room, you are potentially going to be dealing with the limitations that have already been designed into it.

The starting point is how the control room fits into your surveillance strategy. For example, if you want to have a control room that will be dealing with coordinated response demands using a number of parties, technologies, or data sources, you will need a centralised focus. This is usually best facilitated by a frontal wall display controlled by a response manager or supervisor, who will be coordinating viewing and response actions in real time. Individual workstations may be used for sourcing or casting information, or doing specific surveillance on different areas in a coordinated manner.

On the other hand, if you want to use separate workstations dedicated to specific areas or functions, these may have their own resources for communication to dedicated parties. In this case, the supervisor merely oversees the viewing and response functions conducted discretely by each operator. Using separate workstations means you will need an effective layout that may allow use of alternative sources of information, communication or some overlap with mutual coverage where people can take over others’ functions for a brief period.

For example, on an access control system showing access violations, perimeter or electric fence alarms that need to be monitored still have to be displayed in a way that operators looking at CCTV on individual workstations can see easily. Further, it is not desirable when supervisors or operators in the control room directing response management cannot see camera displays of the areas they are directing people to.

Additional considerations

Protection of the control room and staff needs to be borne in mind, including how easily it may be attacked, vantage points around it that may be used by a sniper, or people from other buildings or environmental features observing what is happening and who is in the control room. Physical features include working space and height, and you need to cater for things like false flooring, lighting attachments and ventilation issues, space between consoles, positioning of monitor walls or screens, and more practical issues around console desk space, and leg space.

Lighting types, and potential for dimming or adjusting lighting around specific areas also needs to be considered, with indirect lighting the preferred option and the avoidance of glare on monitoring and working surfaces. This is a particular issue with flourescent lighting (although I have seen this applied effectively enough with the right diffusers). The use of natural light improves the atmosphere of the control room appreciably, but also has big implications for glare and even heating at times.

Space design and materials used in the control room have a direct impact on noise, and noise diffusion techniques should be in place. The colours used can also impact on visual comfort, light refraction and mood and should be carefully considered. Ventilation and air conditioning should avoid direct drafts onto operator positions, and ideally separate rooms for control room equipment and operators should be provided with cooler temperatures for equipment.

Ideal temperatures may vary from 18 to 24 degrees – it is suggested that some input from operators is obtained when setting this and then keeping it constant, as there are regional differences in how people relate to temperature. Too cool leaves people feeling cold and uncomfortable, while too warm causes drowsiness. Left alone, there are frequent issues of operators adjusting control room temperature themselves to 28 and even 30 degrees, creating climates that can cause tiredness and sleeping.

Enhancing operators’ views

Display layout and management can often defeat the purpose of the control room. The most critical issue in this is ensuring there is an adequate line of sight and viewing angle, as well as a suitable viewing distance to the monitors that will be used and camera views they show. It is not only how easy the monitors are to view, the physical positioning of groups of monitors or large screens is often too high, causing physical discomfort in viewing the screens.

Monitors on workstations often block viewing walls or central monitors, so the console arrangement must also cater to line of sight. Pillars in the control room sometimes need to be planned around. Since CCTV has been around, there has also been a constant issue of trying to cram as many camera views as possible onto a monitor’s real estate. This frequently results in making it impossible to see what is needed to detect incidents because of the size of the camera views being shown. Monitors must deliver a camera view that allows one to see the behaviour indicators of an incident. If you are wondering how many monitors an operator can view at a time, check this article for more information: http://www.securitysa.com/article.aspx?pklarticleid=3313

Your surveillance strategy should also determine which cameras are displayed and when. Not all cameras are equally important, and not all are important all the time. Areas or events that should be subject to live surveillance and times devoted to this should be specified up front. The use of analytics/AI should also be clearly stated as part of the surveillance approach.

For example, AI is good at easily recognisable violations such as movement detection, or presence in a vault/production area out of expected scheduled time expectations. Cheating at a casino table, a gold plant, or diamond valuation bench is much more difficult and relies far more on operator detection. The relative importance of AI alerts, their priority, and where they should be displayed should also be thought through.

Cameras which do not need live viewing, but where detection can be driven by motion detection or something similar, should be prioritised in terms of when and where they are displayed. A surveillance strategy is all about ensuring that the operator’s viewing time is optimised to look at the most relevant camera views at any one time.

Dr Craig Donald.

About Craig Donald

Dr Craig Donald is a human factors specialist in security and CCTV. He is a director of Leaderware which provides instruments for the selection of CCTV operators, X-ray screeners and other security personnel in major operations around the world. He also runs CCTV Surveillance Skills and Body Language, and Advanced Surveillance Body Language courses for CCTV operators, supervisors and managers internationally, and consults on CCTV management. He can be contacted on +27 11 787 7811 or [email protected]

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