Tianfu International Airport takes off with Barco OpSpace in 14 control rooms

The brand-new Tianfu International Airport in Chengdu (China) officially opened on 27 June 2021, and is one of the highest-ranked airports on the Silk Road. It has an annual capacity of 320,000 flight movements (take-offs and landings), resulting in a throughput of 40 million passengers (60 million by 2025) and 700,000 tons of cargo. After Beijing and Shanghai, Chengdu is now the third city in the country to have two international airports with a 4F-runway, capable of accommodating the largest aircrafts in use today.

Getting an airport of this size in operation is a challenge for the designers. There are many different systems that need to be carefully monitored and managed, including the plane operations, passenger movements, security, baggage handling, etc. It was the ambition to make Tianfu Airport efficient, secure, and ready to scale up when needed, ensuring the greatest comfort for everybody involved. That is why Barco was contacted to supply the control room visualization equipment and the operator workspace solutions.

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Tianfu Airport consists of 14 control rooms, including the large Airport Operations Control Center (AOC) and e.g. the Terminal Area Operations Command Center (TOC), Ground Traffic Management Center (GTC), Emergency Rescue, Freight Management and Test Center.

The main AOC hall has a total area of 870 square meters, with room for no less than 105 operator seats. Central in this hall is a very large video wall, consisting of 75 RGB Laser ODL-721 rear-projection cubes in a 15×5 configuration. This results in a screen size of 4.36 meters high and 23.25 meters wide. The extremely stable operation offered by the ODL-series, featuring redundancy of critical components and automatic failover, ensures the 24/7 performance needed in this type of highly critical applications. Displaying the images with true-to-life colors and with special features to reduce the staff’s eye-fatigue, the video wall supports flight safety at the airport and speeds up decision-making.

A second Barco large video wall, consisting of 24 Barco UniSee LCD panels, was deployed in a meeting room, to ensure great visual comfort for easier collaboration and decision-making to staff and management.

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In order to accurately monitor and manage all the information that flows into the different control centers of the airport, the operators can rely on Barco OpSpace. This operator workspace KVM solution allows them to conveniently and flexibly handle all the different information sources, according to their most natural working habits. The ‘Follow Me’ feature allows the employees to sit at any position and have their permission levels and preferred working environment immediately available. With 277 OpSpace seats available, the whole airport benefits from this innovative and reliable system. Now and in the future.

The distribution of information around the airport is also handled by Barco technology. The TransForm N networked media platform securely brings all data from the 920 encoders to the destination, be it any of the large video walls or any of the OpSpace operator desks. Compatible with many kinds of ICT and AV sources, Barco’s video wall controller network TransForm N smoothly handles the data distribution with no manual access needed. And if more sources become available in the future this poses no problem to the network: just plug it into the architecture and it will become available to operators with the needed access requirements.

The opening of Chengdu Tianfu International Airport not only marks the presence of an important aviation hub in southwestern China, but also sets a milestone for intelligent transportation!

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Why the customer chose Barco:

Barco was contacted for its outstanding reputation in the control rooms market and proved a strong commitment in delivering the first network-based, distributed operator workspace solution in a large-scale airport environment. OpSpace quickly became the trusted solution of choice thanks to the easy integration into the IT infrastructure. The deployment was managed by a system integrator, who was pleased with the ease of installing and scaling the solution.

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