Moving Forward: Technology Solutions to Enhance
Transportation Control Room Performance
Performance Takes Flight
To improve performance, a major
international airport needed to
consolidate five control centers into a
single command and control center for
managing all operations.
Using high-performance KVM
technology, the airport has consolidated
29 dispersed departments into one
centralized control room to:
• Share desk information with video
walls in real time for smooth disruption
and incident knowledge transfer.
• Increase resilience by simply swapping
out transmitter and receiver units,
bringing users back online instantly
and with no single point of failure.
• Securely back rack all systems in a
communications room.
• Increase flexibility and support growth
with the ability to add and upgrade
equipment without replacing installed
systems.
• Provide immediate access to critical
information, enabling quick resolution
of emergency situations without
leaving the control room
Whether managing traffic, railways, subways, airports, trucking or shipping fleets,
transportation control rooms are complex operations. Keeping a transportation system
moving means operations teams need to rapidly access, view and aggregate a wide
range of information maintained in multiple systems and delivered in disparate formats,
such as video feeds, teleconferencing, maps and more.
For many transportation control rooms, this proves a difficult task. Isolated systems
and workstations create information silos. Control rooms must buy multiple expensive
systems or force users to move from place to place to access vital information , and
collaboration is nearly impossible with one-at-a-time access.
When considering how to optimize technology to improve the effectiveness of your
transportation control room and the efficiency of the people who operate it, the
following key capabilities can help you achieve a user environment that is not only
conducive to demanding 24x7 operations, but also offers ease of maintenance, lower
costs and higher security.
Increasing Operator Efficiency and Productivity
One way to enhance efficiency in the control room is to take advantage of highperformance technology KVM switches , which offer a quick, simple way to provide
access to an unlimited number of systems from any user’s workspace. This eliminates
the need for users to physically move from place to place—they can switch between
systems in seconds and with just a few keystrokes right from their workstations. High
Performance Technology KVM switches can help to promote work efficiency and
collaboration, as both local and remote users can shift instantly between systems to
share screens, sessions and information.
Using High Performance KVM technology that provides remote extension capabilities,
equipment can be moved out of the control room to create a more work-friendly
environment. However, with mission-critical systems remotely located, it is vitally
important that users still have a high-fidelity, always-on experience. The fact that
Moving Forward: Technology Solutions to Enhance
Transportation Control Room Performance
the machine is no longer sitting next to the desk needs to be completely
transparent to the user. This requires platform-agnostic KVM switches that
remotely support all types systems and peripherals and offer a pixel-perfect
experience with no latency or downtime.
Making IT’s Job Easier
Technology management in the control room can be considerably simplified
to reduce time and costs for installing, provisioning, monitoring and
troubleshooting systems. KVM switches offer plug-and-play convenience
to bring new systems online with minimal time and effort. In addition, the
remote extension capabilities mean that equipment can be back-racked in
a separate location, enabling IT to reduce risk and increase availability by
keeping equipment in a properly secured and cooled environment.
Future-proofing at Lower Cost
Transport control centers need ways to easily accommodate
growth, bringing new users and systems online quickly and
without disruption. However, this flexibility cannot come with
an unlimited price tag. To future-proof your control room at
the right cost:
•Seek out KVM technology that provides an easy way to share
systems between users. Sharing systems reduces operating
costs and can reduce the number of primary and hot standby
systems needed to support operations. This can add up to
substantial capital cost savings and can even eliminate the
need to build multiple control rooms.
In any transportation control room resilience is paramount, as operations
must continue without interruption. High-performance KVM switches are
an effective way to keep operations running smoothly even when a system
goes down. They can eliminate any single point of failure and provide instant
switching to hot standby systems while continuing to deliver a high fidelity
experience. They also offer greater resilience than using virtual machines
for redundancy, which can require hundreds of users to switch to a virtual
standby system, quickly degrading performance. With KVMs, you can direct
each user to a different hardware target so that if the target fails, just one user
needs to switch to a hot standby machine.
•Use technology that is designed to be vendor-agnostic. KVM
switches that support all types systems and peripherals—
regardless of type, vendor or location—offer security for the
future, facilitating growth and change in the control room.
By combining KVM technology with centralized remote management, IT
can simplify maintenance and troubleshooting. Sophisticated solutions
for remote management provide a single source of truth about all assets
in the control room. IT can automate the process of finding, connecting to
and administering systems through a single console, as well as get realtime status information and instant diagnostics to forestall downtime and
diagnose problems. Staff can easily collaborate as multiple administrators
in different locations can access and share the same system. In addition,
centralized management improves security, providing role-based user access
rights that can be propagated across multiple systems and use existing
services such as LDAP or Active Directory for authentication.
Avocent® offers solutions for every type of transportation control
room, providing flexible solutions that grow and evolve right along
with your business. All of the Avocent high-performance solutions
can be sized to deliver an operating environment that exactly
matches your business requirements.
•Look for a vendor who does not force you to purchase
technology that either doesn’t deliver the power and
flexibility you need, or demands unnecessary expense. Your
vendor should be able to correctly size your control room
solution to deliver an operating environment that matches
your business requirements.
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