SMART EVENTS: Towards an intelligent management of international sporting events
By mariola zarco (student of the Master in Computer Engineering).
Most of us at one time or another have heard of the concepts Smart Phone y Smart Building, but maybe not so much about Smart City1 (Open or not), IoT (Internet of Things), not much less than Industry 4.02 or smart events (especially those not so familiar with the technological field).
Whether it is the next World Cup in Qatar 2022 this winter, or the next Olympic Games in Paris 2024, these events face important questions regarding the efficiency of their management. Part of the work to control this efficiency would be solved by gathering information about the event through mechanisms that apply the use of devices, platforms and technologies linked to IoT. The issue is that today we do not have frameworks in this area that can be used homogeneously in the sector and the organizers end up being bombarded with proposals that are difficult to integrate due to the intrinsic characteristics of the events, such as a limited budget, a very specific completion date and, in most cases, the fleeting nature of being just a single edition in the same country, in the same facilities or under the same conditions.
Only those of us who work behind the scenes are aware of the number of people needed to manage an event of such characteristics, and the difficulties that it entails due to the lack of technological support solutions. Perhaps for the public, only serious cases of deficiencies in the organization are known, such as the security management at the Champions League Final in Paris last May, but I can assure you after 12 years working in international events that the management of the flow of people in the areas of an event (organizers, attendees, staff, security, cleaning...) is essential for its success. In the scientific field, some authors have recently begun to propose the application of devices IoT for the management of areas with transit of people, such as car parks3, but apart from some mere isolated references, to date, there is no detailed study of the opportunities and benefits that the application of this type of technology would present.
However, apart from the event management itself, it can be perceived how little by little the events are echoing some of them. For example, Paris 2024 is going to implement the use of digital twins for the first time.4 to perform simulations of camera shots, detecting shadows. The possibility of carrying out a year-long study of the incidence of sunlight at different times of the day and translating it into a digital twin greatly facilitates the positioning of the cameras for taking shots, as well as the logistics of the cameras and help operators to find the optimal location options for live recordings. Another use of digital twins is the creation of virtual replicas of venues, so that visits to the facilities are no longer made physically (in some cases of more than 600 people before the start of the event), but virtually. This gives rise to two fundamental positive consequences: on the one hand, the significant cost savings on flights and improvements in sustainability, thus reducing the environmental impact and, on the other hand, the ability to obtain a feedback more precise and located on the twin itself instead of plans made by AUTOCAD with different nomenclatures according to the type of end user, thus facilitating the visibility of interrelationships between them.
In addition, I also see how the main football clubs in our country create their own innovation centers 5 6 and they even offer master's degrees in which they describe the detailed impact of new technologies in various areas, such as Big Data, mainly in the area of performance (statistical and strategic analysis) and commercialization or marketing (knowledge of fans to increase sales ). Outside of football I also see how in other sports like basketball, Baskonia7 even dares to flirt with the metaverse8 or companies like NBN239 They are made with the basis of basketball at European level with a project that began merely by digitizing minutes.
In short, today we have sports entities willing to make the leap to change and the adoption of new tools, more than perhaps we can think of. But for them to be applicable in the field of large-scale sporting event management, we are missing, from my point of view, three fundamental aspects:
- Integration and integration criteria for existing platforms. Today, many international federations and sports clubs are overwhelmed trying to integrate platforms that provide them with services into their infrastructures, with great difficulty. FIFA has begun to develop its own event management platform internally, including all the modules that it has subcontracted to other entities to date, because they have realized that the management of their data, as well as the security of the data they they can obtain with internal and proprietary development is much more important than the relative cost-benefit advantage that outsourcing can entail.
- Technological and technical training of the personnel who work in them. Sometimes an event director or his operations managers are approached with proposals that would definitely be very useful for the management of the event. The mere inertia of doing things as usual, together with the laziness of learning something new and "stopping" (even if it means taking a step back to catch up) and on many occasions the difficulty of being able to explain exactly how the application of these technologies can help solve problems, makes proposals not be considered as they should.
- A platform for exchanging technical (computer) expertise and specialist knowledge in a specific area of the event (logistics, security, ticketing...). In other words, even if a computer technician could speak the language spoken by an event manager and vice versa, it would not be enough, since two people cannot define an event, but if there were a platform for bidirectional “translation of needs/generation of ideas” technique/specialization I am convinced that there would be many solutions that could be implemented by bringing together two teams of IT technicians and event specialists.
Thanks to the ESI Computer Engineering Master I have been able to discover protocols such as Zigbee, microprocessors such as Arduino for the design of integrated devices, or learning about technologies such as RFID for radiofrequency identification, which have allowed me to learn more about the technologies IoT and helped identify potential solutions to operational problems that exist in the professional sector I come from10: management of large-scale international sporting events, also known as major events (large scale events) and I hope to be able to carry out a Final Master's Project (TFM) and Doctoral Thesis that can define an adequate development framework for them in the coming years.
I would like to end the article by mentioning the Smart ESI project11 within our School, of which its first phase has been launched at the end of this 2021-2022 academic year, which, even in its early days, helps with its visibility to arouse the interest of many students seeing the immediate application of everything they study and learn in class.
References:
[1] https://administracionelectronica.gob.es/pae_Home/dam/jcr:8abd4551-4598-471c-8ee7-95a4a612bb0d/Open_Smart_Cities_Tecnologias_de_fuentes_abiertas_para_ciudades_inteligentes_2013.pdf [2] https://www.industriaconectada40.gob.es/Paginas/index.aspx [3] Kubler, Sylvain & Robert, Jérémy & Hefnawy, Ahmed & Cherifi, Chantal & Bouras, Abdelaziz & Främling, Kary. (2016). IoT-based Smart Parking System for Sporting Event Management. 104-114. 10.1145/2994374.2994390. [4] https://www.n3xtsports.com/insights-digital-twinning-paris-2024-and-oneplan/ [5] https://www.realmadridnext.com/next/home [6] https://barcainnovationhub.com/es/ [7] https://www.baskonistas.com/baskonia-el-primer-club-europeo-que-se-une-al-metaverso/ [8] https://www.baskonia.com/baskonia-une-a-la-aficion-en-el-metaverso/ [9] https://www.nbn23.com/es/fiba-europe-visita-las-oficinas-de-nbn23/ [10] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/consumer-business/articles/internet-of-things-sports-bringing-iot-to-sports-analytics.html [11] Smart ESI Project
