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The Lahore Safe City project is part of a region-wide initiative to increase safety by controlling crime and monitoring traffic.
Pakistan's population is growing rapidly and in recent years, the safety of women has become a major issue that needs addressing. Effective digital systems are required to maintain a secure city environment for the community. The project comprises a range of highly integrated Safe City systems, focused around a large-scale CCTV installation that will transform police operations and provide a new working structure in the city.
It is the first and most significant element of a Punjab wide Police Integrated Command, Control and Communication (PPIC3) Centre Programme aimed at creating secure, peaceful and prosperous cities by harnessing modern technology to redefine the capabilities of law enforcement agencies and help ensure public safety.
The overall objectives of the project is to achieve more effective public safety incident tracking and response, reduce traffic violations and improve behaviours; and overall better transparency and automation in police operations by using state of the art city wide infrastructure, systems, and new operational processes run from a new integrated communications, command and control centre.
Punjab Safe Cities Authority (PSCA) commissioned Arup as a trusted independent, technical advisor to support them and provide assurance through all stages of the project.
Project Summary
10,000m² Gold Command Centre and a separate disaster recovery site
8,000+CCTV cameras
Delivering confidence through collaboration
The multidisciplinary project required an integrated team and systems approach in supporting our resilience risk and security team. This comprised of digital, operations consulting, acoustics, intelligent transport solutions and buildings experts from across our global network. Our teams across London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Melbourne acted as technical advisors, providing technical assurance support to the National Engineering Services Pakistan (NESPAK) and Punjab Safe Cities Authority (PSCA) teams
Our global expertise and track record in delivering large scale security and systems technical advice provided confidence that the technical elements were specified, tested and commissioned to appropriate international standards and the solutions benchmarked against international best practice. Through an integrated technical solution approach, we provided an operational solution supporting cultural and organisational change.
An integrated visual approach
We designed an integrated, city-wide communications and surveillance system - benchmarked against international best practice - which brought together information from 15 Emergency Control and Despatch Control suites, CCTV cameras, a new centrally controlled road junction traffic light and red light monitoring systems, road side variable messaging systems and utilised a new private 4G LTE-A network.
The new facilities include 10,000m² of main control and disaster recovery centre with 2,000km of fibre optic network. We installed upwards of 8,000 cameras which are monitored and controlled by over 400 staff in a newly built control centre, the Punjab Police Integrated Control, Command and Communications Centre (PPIC3), situated in the Qurban Police Lines Lahore compound.
Mobile video streams from individual field officers’ mobile handsets can also be sent and enabled for viewing at each operator’s console.
“Arup is helping us to create a centre capable of handling thousands of simultaneous feeds – more than most other centres of this kind, around the world ” Akbar NAsir Khan Chief Operating Officer, Punjab Safe Cities Authority
Securing safety through technology
To visualise the many public safety activities that the centre acts upon, one of the largest video walls in the world has been installed to receive information feeds from the range of sources installed across the city and selected key infrastructure systems across the Lahore and the Punjab.
The system allows the PSCA to not only identify perpetrators for prosecution but was also designed to improve personal safety, road safety and with particular interest paid to areas of the city frequented by women, whose safety has become highly important.
Quality and sustainable product specification
Arup’s technical assurance provision added value from concept to successful delivery with specifications which delivered enhanced project solutions. We applied international standards for products, rigorously testing capabilities to achieve improved performance of the integrated systems.
We redefined the systems integration architecture with the introduction of an enterprise service bus component for facilitating data exchange and integration between PSCA's applications and other Government third parties.
Sustainability aspirations supported our approach to specification, encompassing reduced impact of system operations and product life-cycle longevity.
Solar powered installations were incorporated wherever possible and modular data centre infrastructure to reduce mechanical and electrical loading.
Ensuring a safer future
Advances in technology could see connected security and integrated communications stretching across city boundaries making Pakistan a safer place. This would require integrated systems supported with high-speed, private fixed and mobile 4G networking to transport voice, video and data.
“The project combines audio-visual, data centre and LTE-A communications technology. Many of the things we’re introducing are very new, and we’re lucky that our solutions provider is very willing to innovate. ” Akbar Nasir Khan Chief Operating Officer, Punjab Safe Cities Authority
