Special Events Support by Satellite System

SPESSS Demonstrators and Proof of Concept

Demonstration during the Turin Winter Olympic Games 2006

The project SPESSS (Special Events Support by Satellite System) aims at developing innovative applications and services based on EGNOS signals to support Special Events Management, with special focus on the Security, Safety and Emergency Management, to give a prove of concept concerning the benefits provided by this technology. In this context, EGNOS technology will be exploited, together with the latest generation of user Terminal, such as the PDAs and an advanced software infrastructure, specifically focused on Personal Info-Mobility, whose main components are a Service Control Centres and the Mobile User Terminals (MUTs). A first proof of concept for the SPESSS project has been carried out during the Turin Winter Olympic Games 2006 in the city of Turin with the official endorsement by the TOROC, the Turin 2006 Organising Committee. The demonstration activities began in Turin the 16th of February 2006 and lasted until 24th of February 2006. During the first two days at the GTT premise located in via Daniele Manin the Service and Emergency Control Centre has been deployed and the five User Terminal were configured. The demonstration activity is the result of the deep collaboration between the SPESSS Consortium and the GTT, Gruppo Torinese Trasporti, one of the most relevant european company focus on the management of public transport, which is under the direct control of Regione Piemonte, and had been committed by the TOROC to guarantee the mobility of Key Person with specific Olympic lines in the city of Turin during the Olympic period. The Olympic lines have been designed to allow the K-P to move in a safe and fast way among the different Key-Points in Turin. Buses were fully devoted to these Olympic lines, as well as streets and lines were close to the normal traffic and devoted to them. In this context the contribution offered by GTT spanned from physical support, having provided the location for the Service and Emergency Control Centre and the buses where to install the client side of the application, to the support in defining a subset of user requirements that the consortium implemented. Due to the short developing time and the early stage of the project, and after many meetings between NEXT and GTT during the latest months in 2005, the companies agreed on a list of new requirements and constraints the application had to meet to perform the foreseen activities in Turin:

• A full implementation of the Server side infrastructure was to install at one of the GTT premise in Turin
• Five buses on two distinct Olympic lines would be provided with a PDA on which the application client side was installed.
• The client side should be updated in order to work in an “hand –free” behaviour.
• The monitoring activities were to be performed on daily basis for the selected buses distributed between two different Olympic lines.

Moreover a list of functionalities that characterize the application had been agreed, too. In particular on the Service and Emergency Control Centre the functionalities implemented have been:

• Real-time visualization of each single vehicle
• Visualization of the geo-referenced information received from the Client
• Visualization of the Client status
• Visualization of the Olympic path to be monitored
• Visualization of the start point, end point and stop points for each Olympic path
• Management of the Route Planning for the two Olympic path
• Sending of the path assigned to each Client
• Sending of the schedule to each Client
• Real-time checking for each bus of the respect of both the path and the schedule assigned
• Real-time warnings and alarms visualization in response of variation of both path and schedule
• Real time visualization of alarm received from each Client
• Off line position request of a Client

On the Client side, the new functionalities have been:

• Visualization of the actual position on a map
• Visualization of the path assigned
• Visualization of the start point, end point and stop points
• Sending of the position every one minutes (the frequency can be changed at configuration level)
• Sending of service messages to the SECC
• Visualization of the alerts and alarms received from the SECC
• Sending of geo-referenced information to the SECC
• Sending of defined alarms
• Sending of defined help requests

The SECC was composed by two servers linked in LAN, on which the following component had been installed:

• Server one:
• System and Service database
• System infrastructure
• System operator console
• Server Two
• Service infrastructure
• Service operator console
• High quality raster and vector maps

The Client side had been installed on five PDA Qtek 9090 linked through bluetooth the GPS/EGNOS receiver EMTAC S3 BTGPS. Everyday the five PDAs had been installed on the buses chosen by GTT to be monitored.