ASL Safety & Security is responsible for the design, development, installation and commissioning of the St Pancras International Station Control System (SCS) as part of the CORBER consortium supplying to Network Rail for London’s Eurostar terminal which now hosts the High-Speed 1 fleet.

The project involved the integration of over 8,000 field devices across 16 communication, security and life-safety subsystems including CCTV, BMS, network switches, passenger help points, long line PA and Voice Alarm, access control, passenger information systems, vehicle barriers and PABX.  ASL’s iVENCS product was delivered successfully according to strict time and budget constraints and has since won a number of awards including ‘Best AV/IT Project’ and ‘Systems Product of the Year 2008’. iVENCS - the result of a 4 year research and development programme - features a highly intuitive 3D user interface and widespread use of open source technologies to enable the long-term development and support of the iVENCS platform without vendor lock-in. The platform also incorporates advanced features for failover and redundancy between operational and backup locations, allowing other stations to assume full control of St Pancras International Station in the event of an emergency.The control room itself features five operator positions, each being served by dual workstations. The Eurostar control room is also furnished with an iVENCS workstation elsewhere in the station. Workstations and servers are configured in a redundant grid. Each operator has four screens incorporating an accurate 3D model of the station and all relevant monitoring and control functions. Since the delivery of the project ASL has been providing a daily remote diagnostic and health-check service to Network Rail along with a managed support and maintenance strategy aimed at reducing overall lifecycle costs. This allowed iVENCS to achieve the highest availability figure for any of the systems currently in use at St Pancras.

Download the St Pancras International case study PDF.