A new approach to prison control room design

The design of prison control rooms has evolved over many years, and has generally been dictated by the piecemeal addition of systems as new technology has been introduced. This evolutionary process has led to some obvious shortcomings. The Prison Service has placed a contract for the development of a system designed to overcome these limitations and which will be matched to the specific needs of the prison system. The project is known as Concept 2000, and is a partnership with the prison services of Scotland and Northern Ireland. The prototype system will be exhaustively tested at the Prison Service College, prior to its introduction at selected prisons. The intention is to integrate all existing systems into an open architecture which allows any operator to deal with any of the functions of the control room, with the tasks being allocated intelligently to the operators, each of whom works at an identical workstation. The tasks will be allocated using a knowledge based system and will allow various allocation strategies to be implemented. The main operating software will be based on commercially available industrial control products, proven in real-time, safety-critical applications. Before describing the system in more detail, the paper discusses some of the underlying principles that led to the design.