Wi-Fi video surveillance system for overseeing projects

Jindal Steel & Power Limited has leveraged a Wi-Fi digital surveillance system for 24x7 monitoring and securing of its prestigious Angul Project that has a massive capacity of manufacturing 12.5 MTPA of steel in Orissa. By Akhtar Pasha

Jindal Steel & Power Limited (JSPL) is a leading player in steel, power, mining, infrastructure and oil & gas business with an annual turnover of over Rs 10,000 crores. It has the world's largest coal-based sponge iron manufacturing facility and has rapidly expanded its business to several other parts of the world, particularly in Asia (Indonesia, Nepal, and Mongolia), Africa, South America and Georgia.

To address a larger market (both domestic and export), JPSL had laid the foundation of its Angul Project in 2004 in Orissa. This will be an integrated steel plant with a capacity of 12.5 Metric Tons Per Annum (MTPA) including a 810 MW Captive Power Plant that would produce about 1.5 MTPA of plates and 4.2 MTPA of hot strips. JSPL’s significant area of focus with this integrated steel plant would be on exports. Rakesh Mishra, Head–IT&C, JSPL, said, “The Angul Project is spread across a vast land area of 5,000 acres with no permanent boundaries because of which we used to have a lot of un-necessary visitors [local people] to our premises. It was becoming complex to distinguish local people from our employees. Further, it led to thefts, crimes and damage to equipment. Additionally, since we were creating infrastructure for this project, it required constant monitoring of the project’s progress.”

Mishra added, “We envisaged a business strategy of having Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) to constantly monitor the project progress with 24x7 surveillance and support to reduce fear of crime and incidence of burglary, facilitate the detection and prevention of crime, combat safety threats, record the chronological sequence and duration of events, detect and correct traffic violations etc through increased deterrence and be in a position to produce useable footage as evidence when events occurred.”

Key challenges

The top management wanted constant monitoring [both at the premises as well as the head office in Delhi] of the Angul Project which will be completed as per schedule in December 2010. The top management initially used to make voice calls and exchange e-mails to know the status of the project but this failed to provide an exact picture of onsite progress.

Due to the non-availability of hard data regarding the exact status of the project, the top management had to visit the site regularly, which led to an increase in man hours spent going back and forth travelling to the site leading to increased travel expenditure. Mishra said, “Comparing the ongoing progress against the planned schedule was difficult as all the project areas are located far away from the construction office. Unable to do live linking of project activities with the corporate office, on spot reviewing and analysis of project progress reports submitted for review meetings was difficult.”

Additional JSPL observed that the company security staff were facing a lot of burglaries and hence keeping track of the assets of project was becoming a complicated task. It was hard to completely eliminate the incidence of burglary, criminal damage, vehicle crime etc by placing the security persons in various locations. Further, monitoring the activities on site at night was practically complicated because of the unavailability of a centralized monitoring system and frequent changes in weather. Mishra added, “It was tough producing useable footage as evidence and proof of different incidents of burglary, criminal damages and unauthorized entry in the plant premises for enquiry.”

Wi-Fi surveillance systems to fill the gap

The top management and IT team took the above points as a challenge and did a lot of brainstorming. Finally they arrived at the solution which was to have a CCTV-based surveillance system. The concern of movement to review various projects was constantly being shared among the top management, wherein a solution was conceptualized by the IT & Communications teams to set-up a system that would provide a permanent solution to key challenges at the click of a button. The team studied the site and planned the deployment in such as a way that it would use a minimal number of cameras to cover the maximum possible area.

To keep pace with the competitive, global economy, JSPL needed a business solution that would deliver the power, efficiency and flexibility required for any environment. “The choice of a business solution provider was the mission-critical decision, because of its impact on business performance for years to come. There were many vendors that showed interest in our project we zeroed in on Bosch PLT CCTV cameras because we did not wanted to compromise on quality and accuracy,” said Mishra.

Initially the company procured 17 cameras from Bosch to cover the 3,500 acres including DRI, Plate Mill, Air strip, Coal Gasification and more. [Another 15 cameras will be added in phase II to cover the rest of the area]. However, Mishra’s task was cut out for him as he faced the challenge of placing the cameras where physical connectivity was not possible. He said, “Placing cameras was not a big deal for the team, but getting connectivity at the required bandwidth was the biggest challenge as the wired communication was not practical to connect the cameras and the centralized control room because of the landscape of the project sites. We had to come up with a solution that could stream voice, data and video without compromising on the quality of video. Storing of 24x7 video was another big challenge as far as the implementation was concerned.”

Mishra and his team then presented to the top management the idea of connecting all 17 cameras wirelessly using a Wi-Fi mesh topology. After getting the buy-in, the IT began configuring the access points and CPE for deploying the cameras.

The JSPL corporate office was already connected to IT JSPL CCTV monitoring center in Angul by a physical 100 Mbps MPLS leased line from BSNL [another connection from Tulip acting as a redundant line], which was wirelessly connected to the power plant. The IT team configured 18 CPE and 5 AP (access points from Motorola) that used 802.11b and 802.11g to connect to 15 mobile PLT camera and 2 fixed cameras in a mesh format (point-to-point and point-to-multi-point for redundancy). The Wi-Fi connectivity uses the 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz spectrums.

Mishra said, “We started installing 17 cameras at strategic locations to cover the maximum possible area in December 2009.” He continued listing the support infrastructure that was required to store the captured video. The company went in for a Dell PowerEdge R410 with 4 GB RAM with 2 TB capacity [running Windows Server 2008]. A 50-inch Hitachi Full HD P50X01A plasma TV was installed in the central control room to provide high quality video for monitoring activities.

JSPL procured 17 Bosch cameras at a cost of Rs 50 lakhs and the deployment cost of Wi-Fi surveillance was Rs 80 lakhs.

Transparency in the project

According to Mishra, the wireless surveillance system now provides a detailed overview of the exact status of the project online. The management is quite pleased with the results. There is accountability in everything—people, materials, equipment, project management and security. Since the project was a strategic decision, it cannot be quantified qualitatively. Nevertheless, the results are there for everybody to see. For example, project implementing agencies would also be under pressure to perform as construction status could be recorded by the camera as it happens—eliminating the finger-pointing blame game. With the wireless system providing round the clock video footage to the top management about the project’s progress, it is expected to exert psychological pressure on employees to perform better than expectations.

Additionally, it would not only minimize travel between project sites and offices but also provide a platform where project milestones could be completed on time without any delays in decision-making. The initial reports are quite encouraging as there is a drop in thefts already. “We expect there will be a further reduction in crime and illegal activities at the project. This would help us in quickly identifying bottlenecks and immediately rectifying the same without waiting for communication on issues from the site. The integration of the wireless network with the CCTV setup was indeed a challenge and we achieved this through collaborative requirements meetings, structured project planning and guidance from the top management. This implementation has helped in automating the security and monitoring and saved time and cost. This will make employees more accountable and responsible.”

Rajesh Jha, Executive Director-Projects, JSPL said, “The deployment has helped us in close monitoring of our project sites. It is possible to view each and every corner of the project sites and maintain a close vigil.”

Next up: linking alarm systems to the wireless network

JSPL is planning to link an auto alarm system with the control room so that it can further eliminate inefficiencies. The system will have the ability to search for a particular face [to stop unauthorized people from accessing the site] and raise an alarm. This would help to secure the risk prone areas and ensure that only authorized staff can enter. Mishra said that his next important task was to integrate Primavera [to manage the project portfolio lifecycle] with the network so that the company could carry out analysis of the received footage on the fly in 2D and 3D. The company is also looking for content-based search instead of time-based that would help to reach to a particular instance in the footage without going sequentially through a large amount of video footage. For this, it plans invest in a document management system.

akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com