Hong Kong is an international city that receives 74 million travellers every year. To meet future air traffic growth, an international airport in Hong Kong has been planning to expand airport into a three-runway system (3RS) since 2008. The three-runway system is of great significance to Hong Kong as airport is one of the world's major aviation hubs. In the past 20 years, it has ranked 8 times by Skytrax as the world's best airport in the world.
This $18-billion airport’s 3rd runway project includes the expansion of Terminal Two and a new 3,600 meter long runway. Several brand new airport central control centers will be built to cater for the future air traffic demand. VSI-VTRON is a professional control room solution provider that contributes to this mega project by supplying Two Flip-COB LED display wall, signal processing systems and fiber transmission equipment. This primary LED wall situated in the IAC Main Hall is at the size of 46 x 3.3 Meter direct-view LED display system driven by Digicom ARK5000 Series Processors.
It is VSI & VSI-VTRON's great pleasure to be a partner in its Integrated Airport Control Center (IAC). VSI-VTRON designed and supplied the Flip-COB LED display, LCD display walls, the signal processing systems, the connection and extension devices, fiber connection cables, industrial ventilation fans, LCD Touch display, etc.
This IAC project currently under construction is expected to be in operation by the end of 2022, and the whole three-runway system will be fully operational in 2024. By then, Hongkong International Airport will be handling 120 million passengers per year. The three-runway system is an important project in Hong Kong’s transformation from a “city airport” to an “airport city”. It is expected that by 2030, the direct, indirect and collateral contribution value of the three-runway system from Hong Kong’s airport will be equivalent to 5% of Hong Kong’s GDP, which will bring new impetus to Hong Kong’s economy in the future.
“It’s like to build another airport next to the original airport, which is a big project.” said former Acting Director of Transport and Housing of the HKSAR Government Bureau Director. The new Airport Central Control Center (Main IAC) is an important mission in this major project.
As the "brain" of the entire airport, the three-runway central control center (main IAC) undertakes the responsibilities of operation coordination, service control, abnormal event handling, flight information release, aircraft resource allocation, and coordination and command of various units of the entire airport, ensuring the normal operation of the airport, and is the operation control and production command centre of the airport.
The third runway central control centre (main IAC) applies the VSI-VTRON flip-mount COB display control system. VSI-VTRON provides 1 set of curved flip-top COB display video wall for the main IAC lobby, which is composed of 75X10-row display units, with a display area of 156 square metres and more than 110 million pixels, equipped with VSI-VTRON's powerful transmission control system, which can access more than 140 channels of 4K real-time signals to ensure smooth access and real-time display of massive information and a variety of signals.
There is an Emergency Response Centre (AEC) in the centre behind the main IAC hall, and the centre also adopts VSI-VTRON’s wall-mounted flip-COB video wall. It is composed of 15 columns x 5 rows of front maintenance display units and the transmission control system, which can access more than 30 channels 4K real-time signal, interconnected with the display control system in the lobby of the airport's central control centre.
After the third runway central control centre (main IAC) is fully completed and put into operation, it will serve as the main IAC of the airport. The current Central Control Centre (IAC) will be an alternate centre, which will also adopt VSI-VTRON’s processor so it can be used with the main IAC Seamless.
VSI-VTRON has rich experience in the airport industry, and has completed nearly 40 engineering cases, including airport AOC, TOC, emergency command centre, monitoring centre, and other applications, which help the client complete key tasks such as dispatching command, consultation, and monitoring.
VSI-VTRON Flip-COB display system & Signal Processing Systems
Compared with SMD and formal COB, FLIP-COB has the advantages of higher reliability, more comfortable viewing, and lower energy consumption. In addition to Hong Kong International Airport, important airports such as Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport and Chengdu Tianfu International Airport have adopted VSI-VTRON’s COB display control system. Since taking the lead in launching COB small-pitch display products in 2016, VSI-VTRON has successfully implemented more than 1,400 project cases, which has effectively promoted the productization, marketization and scale of small-pitch LED screens from SMD to COB.
In the IAC and AEC Control Rooms, customers requires flexible signal window layout during its operation for ease of information sharing of its surveillance systems. Moreover 120 CCTV signals, 20~30 console operator signals and airport system signals on the display systems, signal windows across the entire screens, signal windows overlapping, signal window scaling can be achieved easily according to Airport’s need. The project, it equipped with more than 10 Array of VTRON ‘s Digicom ARK5000 Processor to achieve the above requirement from Airport.
The latency is another concern of the end user. More than 5 unit of VTRON’s EPLink are being used to interlink the Digicom ARK5000SP which allow the high speed inter-exchange to different output from one another ARK5000SP with zero latency and no compromising the image quality during transmission. Internal signal processing bandwidth of Digicom ARK5000 between its input or output slots is genuinely seamless. No external matrix switchers or decoders are required to distribute or redistribute the signal among the slots within or among the hardware device. Moreover, there is no signal compression during the signal processing within ARK5000.
For easy and flexible deployment , Digicom ARK5000 series is also equipped with IP decoding board for decoding the application windows from client workstations. The client workstations installed with VTRON’s APPMaster server software will encode The application signal from the Airport to individual IP streaming outputs, which can be decoded by IP decoding board and scaled/ placed on videowall.