Hardware replacement in the Integrated Control Centers of Bavaria

eurofunk replaces the technical equipment of the Allgäu-Kempten Integrated Control Center in record time and without service interruption. A temporary move to an upgraded interim control center was a key factor in ensuring ongoing operational service.
The Allgäu Integrated Control Center is responsible for handling emergency calls in the Allgäu region, for alerting fire departments and rescue services – including mountain and water rescue – for the southwest of Bavaria and for managing the subsequent incidents. Its area of operation covers 3,350 km2 with approximately 485,000 inhabitants in the districts of Oberallgäu, Ostallgäu, Lindau and the independent cities of Kempten and Kaufbeuren. The Allgäu tourism region, which includes the Alps and Lake Constance, extends the control center‘s reach beyond its regional borders to Baden-Württemberg, Switzerland and Austria. Every year, the 40 control center employees handle approximately 230,000 telephone requests for assistance, the associated 100,000 incidents for the rescue services and the additional 4,500 for the fire department. The complexity of the operational area, the increasing number of emergency calls, as well as the increasing danger to life and limb, present the control center staff with major challenges on a daily basis.
In this context, the demands on the technical equipment of the integrated control center as the central element of emergency call handling, alerting and incident coordination, are also high. Equipped by eurofunk for the first time, the system hardware reached the upper limits of its life cycle after many years of uninterrupted operation and was renewed by eurofunk in 2021.
Posing a particular challenge was the need to maintain control center operations while the new hardware was being installed. By relocating six emergency control desks and four emergency call handling workstations to an existing training room, a temporary control center was created in which operations could be maintained while the technical equipment was being replaced. For this purpose, approx. 5 km of interim cables were run from the existing control center to the interim control center and the core infrastructure was relocated to a temporary IT room.
“Thanks to the care given to planning temporary operations, we were able deliver uninterrupted and reliable service throughout the entire conversion phase,“ reports Andreas Jerkovits, project manager of the Allgäu Integrated Control Center. „ Worth highlighting is the efficient implementation of the control center hardware, which required us to work from the temporary control center for about two months. We were also impressed with the realization of the entire project. Despite the restrictions caused by the Corona pandemic, the project was completed in only 9 months from the time of commissioning.“
A further integral part of the project was the renewal of the central, high-availability IT infrastructure for the incident management system and the IP-based communications technology in the equipment room. Eurofunk also added state-of-the-art media technology and new, ergonomic, height-adjustable eurofunk eDesks. The number of emergency control stations was increased by two to ten due to increased demands on the control center‘s operational effectiveness, and ten additional backup work stations were implemented instead of the previous eight.
“Thanks to the exemplary cooperation of the project teams and the professional implementation of the new technology, reliable and effective operation of the Allgäu Integrated Control Center – with all its future challenges – is now assured,“ says Jerkovits.
We at eurofunk would like to thank the team of the ILS Allgäu for their support and cooperation and wish them all the best in their new control center!