The street carnival offers many challenges for the event industry, especially in the days from Old Thursday to Rose Monday, and especially in the carnival strongholds such as Mainz, Cologne or Düsseldorf, but also opportunities for use.
The Comittee Düsseldorfer Carneval e.V. is the umbrella organization of the carnival in Düsseldorf and responsible for the "organization" of the foolish days. The CC plans the course of the individual events, such as the Sunday "Kö-Treiben". The highlight is traditionally the Rose Monday parade. The Venue Planner software was used for the position planning of personnel and material: Personnel positions, tents and other setups were intuitively planned in the browser.
Furthermore, requirements from the security concept made it necessary to visualize the live course of the Shrove Monday procession in the situation center. Together with the Meerbusch-based company PanStreet International, we were able to implement this requirement: About 300 participants of the Shrove Monday procession installed an app from PanStreet on their phones for this purpose, the location data was received in the PanStreet data center and also forwarded to Venue Planner for output. After only a few days of joint interface programming and during the "endurance test" on Altweiber Thursday, we found that the transmitted live data could be visualized very well on the Venue Planner platform.
So on to the next step: the operation at the Shrove Monday procession. As early as 8 a.m., the coordination group consisting of police, fire department, security service, Rheinbahn and the Comittee Düsseldorfer Carneval had met in the city hall under the chairmanship of the Competence Center Events of the City of Düsseldorf. On the second floor of Düsseldorf City Hall, enough screens and a beamer had been set up to allow the group to discuss possible situations or measures.
On some screens the planning of the locks, the areas and the train route could be seen in the Venue Planner, on other screens different icons moved along the train route in 15-second intervals and thus depicted the current live locations of the different train sections. And this over a period of 6 hours!
The feedback on the visualized live data in combination with the planning of the event in terms of personnel and material was consistently positive. The graphic visualization of the live data saved unnecessary calls during the operation, and the train line was gradually reopened to traffic.
The "foolish days" were more than informative for the further development of the live tool. Future fields of application are, for example, the live display of traffic densities or the concrete position of buses or streetcars or the visualization of sensor data combined with the event planning already created in Venue Planner.
