Project Info :
In a commercial agreement with two other companies, Ferrovial Agroman UK was charged with building the service tunnels from Royal Oak to Farringdon, which are 6.16 km long, one of the tunnels in the major Crossrail London project.
The Crossrail is one of the largest engineering projects in Europe and an important part of the municipal transport strategy. Crossrail will connect 37 stations, including Heathrow Airport. The civil engineering projects are slated to be finished in 2017.
This is a project which has the dangers inherent to underground excavations, with the presence of heavy machinery and the constant movement of people and vehicles. In this environment, human safety is one of the key points, since it is essential to know at all times how many people are in the tunnels, where they are and who they are.
In order to meet this need, we at Bioaccez proposed installing a network of active RFID receivers connected to the Ethernet, which had already been used in other applications. Each receiver is connected to a high-performance, directional antenna which operates at 2.4 GHz. A pair of receivers near the entrance to the tunnel provides information on workers as they enter and exit.
The programme that manages the presence in zones is Secure-Loc, whose goal is to signal the location of workers and track people by qualifications. This allows the company to know the exact location of the person more efficiently and effectively.
The combination of systems allows the company to have comprehensive control over security in the tunnels which is visible from a single graphic interface. The system sends alerts to the programme administrators depending on the defined parameters by email.
Having the information needed at all times gives the managers of a project of this complexity major peace of mind.
