What can you expect from a Smart Stadium?

As home entertainment systems improve (e.g. 3D HD TV), stadiums are coming under increased pressure to differentiate themselves and offer a pleasing entertainment environment for their fans and visitors. 

To continue to attract visitors, there is a need to address the challenges of managing traffic flows,  parking, the need for collaboration with public safety officials (police, fire, ambulance) etc.

The most progressive stadiums are investing in technology that can be used to improve the operation of their facilities, essentially enabling them to create a Smarter Stadium.

The ability to monitoring gate throughput can result in a better understanding of how fast the stadium is filling, enabling operations staff to optimize the flow of traffic into and out of the stadium, as well as within the grounds. Data from the turnstiles can be aggregated into a dashboard and analyzed against key performance indicators. Operators can use dashboards to view the flow rate across each gate, and if the traffic becomes too high, they can take corrective action by either slowing the flow further downstream, or diverting traffic to other gates with more capacity. As fans drive into the stadium, they could be notified by SMS to park at an alternative location to optimize traffic flow into the stadium.

Performance of concession stands can also be monitored to understand how each is performing. Monitoring sales channels and offers performance should give a good insight into POS revenue and concourse level revenue, making it possible for decisions to be taken in realtime to improve sales performance on the fly. Data could be aggregated further into concession location revenue and terminal revenue to analyze and understand buying behavior and trends across different parts of the stadium. Sales transaction information could also be combined with other queue monitoring systems to offer realtime navigation assistance to stalls with the shortest queues, or ensuring stalls do not run out of items in popular demand.

Another interesting use case could be related to compliance. Let's assume that alcohol sales are not allowed past the 4th quarter of a football game. Sales data from the POS terminals could be aggregated and the transactions validated against business rules. When an alcohol sale violation incident occurs, an alert is triggered and relevant information could be displayed on the stadium operations consoles and stadium maps, and passed onto an Incident Management system where a notification could be sent to other systems and devices, e.g. to alert staff with mobile devices. All data generated can be stored in a data warehousing system for subsequent analysis and reporting. 

The capabilities and use cases described in this article can be implemented on IBM's PureApplication System, a system designed to reduce IT complexity and accelerate time to value.  It  ships with all storage, networking and compute capabilities integrated into a rack in the factory, and pre-configured and optimized for Web Application and Database workloads. Patterns are used to capture best practice and accelerate the deployment and lifecycle management of pre-integrated, optimized industry solutions like the one described in this article.

Visit the IBM Smarter Stadium Solution for more information