Mobistar and Cropland map out crowds of people during large-scale events in commission of Antwerp’s city Council

Brussels, 14 April 2016 – Mobistar and Cropland are collaborating in commission of and with Antwerp´s city council to ensure the security of events and optimise the functioning of several Antwerp municipal departments. The new big data applications that the two players are implementing in 2016 will significantly improve the day-to-day functioning of the City of Antwerp, especially during the organisation of large-scale events.

The City of Antwerp has been investing since quite some time now in mobile data, WiFi technology and other technologies in order to be able to map the crowd. This is part of the policy of the City of Antwerp to retrieve as much objective data possible about the impact of its tourism, recreational, hospitality and retail policy. The security services of the City of Antwerp also make use of this data.

Mobistar, Cropland and the City of Antwerp announced today that they will be intensively collaborating to further optimise event coordination and the provision of services for tourists. Security and mobility are central in this effort.

In 2015, Cropland and Mobistar conducted tests on crowd monitoring during the Sinksenfoor carnival fair, the Giants´ visit and the start of the Tour de France. There was real-time data streaming to the police command vehicle during the fireworks display on New Year´s Eve as well. For all of these events, Mobistar furnished the anonymous data and Cropland processed the results in a dashboard and via reports, thus making it possible to clearly see at every moment precisely how many people were present at which locations throughout the city. The insights that were generated constituted a substantial added value when it came to coordinating security during these events. The city subsequently decided to expand the cooperation with Cropland and Mobistar.    

Security during large-scale events in the city

Mobistar and Cropland signed up to work on 10 events this year, including the Antwerp 10 Miles & Marathon (April 17th) and the Tall Ships Races (July 7th - July 10th), where they will map out the crowds of people in real time. Crowd monitoring offers numerous new possibilities for the City of Antwerp and for the further development of the services it provides. For example, amongst other things one measures the impact of weather conditions on how a crowd moves, the pressure on the arterial roads leading to and leaving from the event is mapped out, and so on.

City crowd monitoring

Day tourism, stay tourism and the organisation of events all have a major economic impact on a city. Marketing is becoming ever more important for cities and municipalities and, in recent years, crowd monitoring - the measurement of the presence and movement of groups of people - has become an important component. New measurement techniques and ´big data´ analytical tools make it possible to detect and map out mobile devices.

Data privacy is always respected

The sources for the analyses are anonymised traffic data from the Mobistar network. The data are anonymised at the source and filtered via specific algorithms in order to be able to comply with the regulations on the protection of personal data at all times.

About CROPLAND

Cropland seeks the added value of data by applying advanced pattern and text mining analyses and correlating different data sources with one another in order to generate new insights and understanding. Cropland processes and analyses data using 4 applications: Behavibility©, Traceability, Connectability and Readability. You can find more information about the activities and customers of Cropland on its website www.cropland.be.