Qatar Mobility Innovations Center (QMIC), a leading national innovations centre focusing on using R&D to enable sustainable, smart, and safe living, has successfully worked with key local and international stakeholders to deploy a number of its home-made smart solutions and services to support the successful FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.
QMIC worked closely with the global organisers to provide a customised intelligent journey planner, which was extensively used during their World Cup operations for trip planning and navigation from and to multiple vital locations in Doha. In particular, more than 300,000 requests were made to this customised platform from mid-November to mid-December 2022, a statement explained.
QMIC worked with the tournament organisers to install and operate its digital parking system, powered by QMIC’s Falcon-I Artificial Intelligence Platform, across all eight stadiums and three major park and ride locations in Doha. This intelligent system provided organisers with a great deal of insights into parking utilisation and real-time occupancy levels on match days and throughout the tournament. The critical system, which supported parking and mobility operations around stadiums, was integrated with the main operations control centre of the tournament. This real-time information was also exposed to Wain mobile users which provided important information for the fans using their vehicles to reach the stadia parking in a smooth and intelligent way by guiding them to the most suitable parking.
Smart Intersection Monitoring was another system powered by QMIC’s Falcon-I platform and provided a comprehensive solution to road operators in monitoring intersections and highways efficiently, complementing existing CCTV infrastructure. This solution enabled the automatic monitoring and detection of yellow box violations at intersections, as well as measuring traffic pile-up and queue length. These services were accessed by road operators at several intersections and in real-time to take any necessary actions.
Several versions of the popular Wain mobile application (used by more than 135,000 users during the event) were released a few days prior and throughout the tournament. These versions introduced many important features related to the World Cup and enabled an enjoyable fan experience in terms of optimised navigation, accessing real-time parking availability, providing information about, points of interest, the delivery of customised push notifications based on the user interests, and the ability to update road closures and openings in Wain in near real-time. The diverse and rich Wain content and map data were successfully managed through QMIC’s newly developed Content & Alert Management System (CAMS).
Utilising QMIC’s own intelligent mobility analytics platform (Masrak) and its extensive data collection network which collects tens of millions of data records a day, daily reports of traffic movements, trends, behaviours, and heatmaps were generated and shared with key partners and stakeholders to assess the performance and the resiliency of the Qatar road network throughout the tournament and take any necessary actions.
Dr Adnan Abu-Dayya, QMIC CEO & executive director said: “After many years of planning, R&D, and the development of scalable digital platforms and applications, we are extremely happy with our ability to deploy and operate many of these platforms in support of the World Cup. The knowledge created and local technology systems developed as part of this process are visible examples of the sustainable legacy created by the World Cup. I want to sincerely thank my colleagues at QMIC who worked tirelessly before and during the tournament to ensure 100% availability and reliability of our digital platforms and applications. A big thank you is also extended to local and international organisers and other stakeholders who relied on us to support their operational needs. We would also like to extend our appreciation to the tens of thousands of Wain users who benefited from the application and helped us introduce more services and content to support their needs”.
"QMIC’s experience and contributions to this global momentous tournament is an important indicator of the role that locally developed technologies can play in supporting mega events given the chance. QMIC will continue to work closely with strategic partners and national stakeholders to ensure and enable the success of future mega events and projects in Qatar and the region," the statement added.
