Outdoor automation: remote management of advertising billboards

Profile 

• A company which owns a fleet of advertising billboards all over the French territory.

Such billboards are regularly controlled by maintenance agents who travel around to check if they are up and running.

Issue

• Reduce billboard downtime to improve customer satisfaction.
• Offer new display options to announcers.
• Enhance maintenance agents' efficiency and effectiveness, avoiding useless on-site visits.
• Decrease penalties given by announcers due to billboard breakdowns.

Our response  

• Integration of a communication module into advertising billboards to remotely control the PLC (Programming Logic Controller) which runs the billboard.
• Development of a server application which can alert maintenance agents when a billboard is out of order.
• Remote access to the application from a PDA which enables maintenance agents to update their intervention report (greasing, wear checking...).
• Functionality of automatic reminder for maintenance actions to be carried out on billboards.
• Possibility to fine-tune advertising campaigns: scheduling display time, sequence of displayed faces depending upon the days of the week.

Application features

• Application managed by a central server.
• Multichannel access to the control interface: PDA. desktop, mobile phone.
• Two-way communication (GPRS full-duplex) to remotely control billboards.
• Various formats of alerts sent by the module or the server: SMS, e-mail, phone calls.
• Cascading alerts. 
• Possibility for many users to set parameters by themselves. 

Customer benefits

• Optimized advertisement display time.
• Customized and more complete commercial offer (teasing, optional displays...).
• Better follow-up of maintenance agents' work as their report and schedules can be remotely updated. 
• Intervention time saving.
• Improved agents' efficiency: maintenance time is reduced while display time is increased.

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