Auckland Transport’s advanced analytics to promote public safety

Auckland Transport expanded its network of video cameras and updated its data platform to better monitor vehicles and serve people in the city. Photo: Hewlett Packard Enterprise

AUCKLAND TRANSPORT (AT) has selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to deliver an AI-enhanced video feed to optimise transport routes, promote public transportation, and support decision-making for law enforcement.

AT is responsible for the region’s transport services including roads, footpaths, public transport, and parking. Its day-to-day activities keep Auckland’s transport systems moving and works to address traffic congestion, encourage more people to use public transportation, and keep citizens safe on roads and in public spaces.

Previously, AT used 2,500 cameras to monitor the city for safety issues creating an everincreasing amount of data. AT was using aging technology, and the ongoing costs of maintenance and outsourced management of the platform were significant. The expansive system was complex, difficult to upgrade, and nearing its end of life.

AT needed a cost-effective solution that would enhance productivity and automation as well as encourage more people to use public transport which had been significantly disrupted with the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is also one of their goals as a supporter of the Auckland Transport Alignment Project – a multi-agency effort that encourages public transportation use to reduce congestion, environmental impact, and road death and injuries. “We use the data to convert people to public transport. We know how long it takes to get from point A to point B by car and we let people know that they can get there twice as fast on the bus,” said Roger Jones, Executive General Manager, Business Technology for AT.

Unfortunately, AT’s former CCTV technology overwrote camera footage after time, while data grows with increased use and more cameras throughout the city. This was problematic for AT with limited scalability of its video management system (VMS) which creates a petabyte of data per week. The agency is also required to save the footage for seven years in case of public safety incidents.

Their server was unable to support these growing demands and their desire for more sophisticated analytics. If a server went down, AT’s data would be lost. There was also increasing time, labour, and costs incurred to maintain an aging system. Their vision involved bigger plans than the original VMS could support.

Therefore, AT transitioned its VMS to a new data platform on one of HPE's servers. This resulted in a 41 per cent rack space reduction – from 68 rack units spread across three racks, to 40 rack units in two racks. reduced power and cooling costs, without compromising the system’s capacity to handle unstructured data in the exabyte realm.

The modern solution allows AT to avoid upfront IT costs and enables customers to pay only for what is used, while a dashboard reports in real time transport flow, consumption and congestion rate, and compute and storage trends. This data is vital for forecasting and planning to enable people to move seamlessly and safely around Auckland city.

In addition, the new solution allows AT to increase its camera usage, supporting 60 per cent more cameras and scaling from 2,500 to 4,000, making parking officers’ jobs more effective and efficient.

The reliable file system can handle unstructured data in the exabyte range while also reducing AT’s data centre footprint by 41 per cent and decreasing energy consumption by 37 per cent.

“We’re excited to work with AT and deliver a unified, cost-effective solution that uses AI to keep people safe and support their mobility,” said Colin Henderson, Managing Director, Hewlett Packard Enterprise NZ.

This is an example of the combined power of HPE Solutions and Qumulo (an American data storage company based in Seattle, USA), delivering unstructured file data at massive scale and performance thanks to select configurations.