Commend: Worldwide Need for Security Is Also Challenging Parking Operators

These days, a parking operator's lot isn't exactly an easy one, especially where hot-button issues like security are concerned. This is glaringly apparent in view of new emergency scenarios involving violent attacks targeted at public buildings such as airports. Events like these are bringing home the fact that, as potential targets, parking garages need to ramp up their security as well. Fortunately, there are means and ways to help operators along. Latest intercom hub technologies, for example, help parking operators to cover the full range of operational security issues from routine customer assistance to fully-fledged emergency and threat response. And yes, they even double as platforms for regular office and staff communication.

Managed parking today isn't what it used to be only a decade ago. In addition to the dangers that operators have been faced with all along (e.g., fire hazards, gas leaks and the like), new emergency scenarios have cropped up on the back of a disconcerting upward trend in violent attacks like riots, terrorism or shooting sprees. Against this background, the issue of building security is coming to the fore in off-street parking.

ASBIS For Parking Means Business

In an effort to combat the situation, legal regulations and standards, such as IEC 62820, are imposing a mounting set of responsibilities on parking operators and their security staff. Fortunately, however, help is on the way, and it comes in the form of IEC 62820 Part 2, specifying the technical requirements for the composition, function, performance and testing methods of Advanced Security Building Intercom Systems (ASBIS).

As such, an IEC 62820 conformant ASBIS serves multiple purposes. Built on top of a high-end communication system, it leverages technologies from intercom to building controls or public address and brings them together on a central control desk to meet latest security standards. Already an increasingly common requirement in tender specifications for building facilities all over the world, the IEC 62820-2 standard describes the technical essentials on how to support Mastering the Mundane With Cloud Intelligence (EOPs) with Intercom solutions for advanced security in off-street parkings.

Raising the Standard

For example, the new IEC 62820-2 standard calls for a technical Risk Manager to determine the required security level. It also provides criteria for the technology to be implemented in order to address these requirements. The Risk Manager's assessment determines how the technical equipment will support the parking operator in managing a dangerous situation or emergency. Definitive requirements and protection goals must therefore be specified right at the beginning of each planning stage. Deciding early on which features are needed will help to limit the costs to what is technically necessary, and it will ensure that existing technical systems can be incorporated into future concepts. Once the technical equipment has been selected, it has to perfectly support all organizational processes.

Dealing With Danger

IEC 62820-2 compliant solutions as seen at Intertraffic ensure reliable communication across the entire parking security equipment to support a decisive, well informed response to emergency and danger situations around the clock. Usually this involves a concerted use of strategically placed emergency call terminals in combination with motion or sound detectors, as well as integrated CCTV and building controls for things like sprinkler systems or shutter gates. Coordinated centrally from a control room, the overall solutions are flexible enough to even cope with moving threats such as active shooters that may shift their position. They do so, for example, by adjusting escape routes and evacuation measures in real-time to adjust to a developing situation, triggering lockdown procedures, opening doors and exit gates, playing pre-recorded announcements over the PA system, and so on.

What makes it all possible is new fail-safe communication and security technology designed to help security staff to monitor and control everything from a central workstation with a streamlined user surface. As far as off-street parking security goes, the system covers the entire emergency reaction chain, from prevention and alarming to situational awareness and on to response and de-escalation.

Mastering the Mundane With Cloud Intelligence

As any other equipment, an ASBIS, too, must earn its keep. Being there 'just in case' would be economically extravagant, if not downright inefficient, if the system would not also prove its worth in everyday communication. Here, as always, flexibility is the key to efficiency. Working under the hood of an ASBIS is a supporting array of advanced features intended to make everyday communication and control tasks effortless for users and economically efficient for operators. One notable example is voice analysis, such as 'Intelligent Voice Recognition' (IVR). Technologies like these are being developed to pre-analyze a caller's voice, for example to weed out prank calls and the like. It does this by employing artificial intelligence to learn to distinguish between the voice patterns in legitimate and fraudulent calls. The same technology could prove useful in other areas as well, such as authenticating staff acoustically. Another feature would be Dynamic Volume Control (DVC), which analyzes ambient noise to adjust the volume level of announcements to make them stand out for better clarity (something all of us who are familiar with drowned-out passenger announcements in busy train stations and airports will appreciate).

Or take the emergency call points, for example. Latest-generation models come with a touch screen, a sleek changeable user interface and amazing sound quality. Acting as communication points in a crisis situation, they might show an emergency layout with distress call buttons and evacuation messages. With the emergency over, however, they can switch to an 'everyday mode', sporting a layout with customer assistance call buttons and commercial messages. Where the handy double use for both emergency and everyday use is concerned, the calculation is simple: once invested, twice efficient.

In summary, when it comes to facing the parking industry’s evolving security and communication challenges, IEC 62820-2 compliant advanced security Intercom solutions are setting the standard for keeping today’s parking facility safe and sound well into the future, giving patrons and operators a (parking) lot to look forward to.

About Commend

Commend is one of the world’s largest providers of high-end Security Communication systems. A member of worldwide security solution provider THK Group, Commend International was founded in 1971 and is headquartered in Salzburg, Austria.

With app. 160 employees at its headquarters, Commend is well integrated into THK Group’s 4.800 worldwide staff and also maintains an international partner network of more than 400 people (spanning more than 40 countries ). The corporate culture has a strong focus on people and cooperative partnerships to ensure outstanding user value with systems known for their superior reliability, convenience and voice intelligibility / clarity of voice transmission.

Commend Control Desks and Intercom Stations for security communication solutions incorporate speech, video, data and third-party equipment control. They embrace the most useful networking and mobile technologies and serve millions of users every day, for example in the German automobile industry, at public transport services such as the London Underground, as well as numerous buildings, road traffic and parking facilities the world over.

Commend offers dedicated turnkey solutions for Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Parking, Lifts, Prisons, Police, Heavy Industry, Airport, Rail and Transport infrastructure, Military and many other Top Security communication applications.

For more information, visit www.commend.com.