Lille

Located in northern France, Lille is the principal city of the Lille Métropole, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country after Paris, Lyon and Marseille. Situated on the Deûle River, near the Belgian border, Lille is the capital of the Nord-Pas de Calais region and the préfecture of the Nord department.

Transpole

Lille Métropole has a mixed mode public transport system, comprising buses, trams and a driverless metro system, all operated under the Transpole name. The Lille metro is a VAL (light automated vehicle) system, opened on May 16, 1983 as the world’s first automatic metro. The metro system has two lines, with a total length of 45 km, serving 60 stations. The tram system consists of two interurban tram lines, connecting central Lille to the nearby communities of Roubaix and Tourcoing. 68 urban bus routes cover the metropolis, eight of which cross the border into Belgium.

Pre-existing situation & UTCFS’s role

Across the entire Lille metro network there are over 1,200 security cameras installed. Transpole sought to modernise its surveillance system to increase passenger security. It decided to upgrade the system to enable a complete digital grid overview of all 60 stations. All camera data would need to be storable and available for possible consultation later. The solution also needed to be adaptable to new requirements and extensions of the metropolitan network in the future. Finally, Transpole sought a system that could be monitored from a single central control room.

UTCFS’s solution

UTCFS offered Transpole a complete video surveillance solution. Data from the existing 1,200 cameras that monitor stations and lines is directly transmitted through 80 VisioWave Evolution encoder/decoder devices. Analogue data from cameras is converted into digital streams, enabling efficient transmission over an IP network. Through this IP network, the data reaches a central control room equipped with a vast storage capacity, equating to 96 hours of storage for each camera. In total, over 115,000 hours of video recording capacity is in place for the system. This is a critical element of the security at the Lille metro, making footage easily retrievable should an undesirable event occur. With this system, UTCFS is helping Transpole create a safe environment for passengers throughout the Lille metro network.