More Solutions developed, installed and commissioned
a stadium lighting control system for Manchester City
Stadium, used for the 2002 Commonwealth Games and now the home
of Manchester City Football Club.
System Features:
- PC redundancy.
- Fully automated during normal day to day operations.
- Fully automated during an event.
- Future events can be programmed into system.
The More Solutions team are software engineers first and foremost, and perhaps nothing
illustrates this better than our work at the City of Manchester Stadium, one of the venues for the 2002 Commonwealth
Games and the new home of Manchester City Football Club.
The stadium has a state-of-the-art lighting system using two PCs to control the lighting throughout
the site, from the highly visible floodlamps and decorative tower lighting to the corridor and basement
lighting, and More Solutions (called Quarella Ltd at the time) was responsible for writing the software
to control the lighting both automatically (for example switching between lighting programs for day,
evening and night), during events (where floodlamps need to be brought on in stages up to two hours
in advance of, say, a football match) and manually (allowing authorised personnel to control any lamp
or block of lamps anywhere in the stadium).
As the system is controlled by a PC rather than light switches it was necessary to ensure that the system
remained operational should a PC fail or loose its connection to the network. This was achieved by running
2 PC's which could both control the lighting system independantly, these PC's also talk to each other, should they
fail to communicate with each other they assume that there is a problem and re-route all network traffic so as to
ensure that lighting control is maintained.
After the games had finished the stadium was taken over by Manchester City Football Club,
www.mcfc.co.uk. Before the
stadium could be used as a football ground a number of building changes were needed, which resulted in
some re-programming of the system, this proved very simple due to the way the original software had been
written.
If you would like to learn more about the systems installed at the Manchester City Stadium please take a look
at the Case Study produced by Clipsal.
View Case Study.
Thanks to Clipsal
and especially Ian Meikle at
enLIGHTen Solutions
for their help.
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