Dubbed ‘Highway H2O’, the all-Canadian Welland Canal is 27 miles long and connects Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Eight giant locks along its route lift ships 326 feet between the two lakes.
Remote surveillance of the vertical lifts is fundamental for traffic management and the safe operation of the locks for shipping and the public. The St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation monitors the entire canal system from a state-of-the-art traffic control centre.
A number of IndigoVision 8000 IP Video transmitter/receiver units were initially installed in 2004 under specific projects to support remote bridge control along the Welland Canal. Since that time the Seaway has continued to deploy additional 8000s as well as installing a number of IndigoVision’s Windows-based Network Video Recorders.
High-bandwidth
The various elements of the IndigoVision based IP video system installed along the Seaway are transported via a high-bandwidth routed network using both layer 2 and 3 segments. Network connections use a combination of both TCP and UDP Multicast transports dependant upon bandwidth availability. The Seaway now utilises 8000s throughout its extensive canal systems between the Port of Montreal and Lake Erie.
The entire CCTV system is now managed using Control Center, IndigoVision’s IP video and alarm management software. Live video is viewed by a mix of Control Center workstations, or where needed by using 8000s as transmit/receive pairs with analogue monitors.
For certain applications, Control Center salvos are used to switch video views and control cameras as dictated by other Seaway canal control systems. The salvos are triggered by canal control PLCs, which make input changes to I/O incorporated in the 8000.
Network management
NVRs with about 8TB each of recording space have been deployed to assist in security and incident management over extended archive periods. Each server is used to record 30fps 4SIF live video from remote locations with each handling about 32 video streams and providing an archive period of approximately 15 days.
The servers and direct attached SAS arrays can be expanded using high-capacity SATA drives for a total storage space on each NVR of about 30TB.