27 Jul Melbourne & Olympic Parks Trust deploys Entrance Control Systems People Counting solution

Accurate real-time counts with Entrance Control‘s laser scanner counters

Melbourne & Olympic Parks Trust (MOPT) is Australia’s premier sports and entertainment precinct which was established on 5th October 1995 by the merger of the National Tennis Centre Trust and the Olympic Park Committee of Management. The venue consists of the Rod laver Arena, Hi Sense Arena, Olympic Park Stadium and the soon to be finished Rectangular stadium which are all used for a wide variety of events all year round including the Australian Tennis Open, music concerts, athletics, cycling and family shows.

For the Australian Open, MOPT wanted to be able to accurately count the pedestrian traffic at the entry / exit points in real time. In addition, there was a requirement of licensing to provide an accurate real-time head count for the new Grand Slam Oval area which provides over 10,000 square metres of carnival fun and is located between the Hi-Sense and Rod laver Arenas.

One of the key issues was, how to accurately count people going through 5 metre wide entrances without causing any interference to the visitors’ experience. MOPT consulted with Entrance Control Systems who undertook a site survey and after considering the environmental issues of very hot summer days with over 40-degree heat and changing lighting conditions recommended their laser scanner which would connect, via the existing network, to a central PC running Traffic Insight, their people counting software.

The laser scanner people counters were mounted directly over the entrances which they continually scanned. The Scanners were commissioned to only detect objects in a certain height window, which meet the defined size requirements. The end result is a highly accurate counter than can ignore small animals, flying birds and carried backpacks.

The Traffic Insight software, in turn, logged all the counts from all the sensors allowing the system to provide accurate real-time counts of population levels as well as later reporting back on hourly counts of pedestrian traffic in and out of areas thereby enabling MOPT to see which events had what kind of draw.

Daniel Andrews, Events Project Manager – MOPT said ‘The laser counters worked very well for us and overall the data was very valuable, particularly at the new Grand Slam Oval where the accurate real-time count assisted us in managing patrons in the area to comply with our liquor license.’

Traffic Insight & Traffic Pro are TradeMarks of Beonic Corp.