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What is key when implementing an Individual Light Control and Monitoring System?

year 2022

More and more airports are moving to centrally monitored and controlled airfield lights.

Being able to control and monitor leads to important efficiency gains, having the switching and monitoring capabilities centrally. The main advantage is to understand the condition of the airfield lights but also the ability to control the lights should this be needed.  In the past only the largest airports wanted to have this level of control but this has substantially changed over the past years with airports of all sizes moving in this direction.

Controlling and monitoring creates a high degree of flexibility but also the possibility to easily implement solutions like follow the green or couple it to any of the existing maintenance solutions.

However, implementing a complex solution like ILCMS is no child’s play whatever some vendors might state in their sales pitch. It requires the airport to meet some conditions before implementation can start.

In general we see two key elements that will determine the success or failure of such a move.

  1. The huge variability of the field conditionsg. the state of the cabling, connectors, transformers, earth connections, earthing system, length of the circuit, etc… many variables that all can impact the performance of an ILCMS without forgetting the different levels of current distortion that surely can affect the communication performance. Make sure that all these elements are audited before you consider any installation as their condition will no doubt influence the quality of the connection between the monitoring units and the central system.

  2. The requirements from a regulatory perspective, often local regulators require a set of conditions that can not always be met because of the quality of any of the underlying elements already installed. If there are quality issues with say the cabling or transformers already in place than this can without a doubt have an impact on the requirements and whether or not they can be met. It’s all about knowing and setting the expectations.

This is why to successfully implement ILCMS understanding the above elements are so critical, which is why every ILCMS project carried out by OCEM Airfield is accompanied by a specialized OCEM Airfield project manager that understands what it takes to create a truly intelligent airfield, using ILCMS.

This also explains the success of OCEM Airfield with ILCMS implementations worldwide, only recently the company installed 5000 addressable ILCMS modules in a military base in the Middle East. The preliminary audit work done and the expertise of the dedicated project manager made the difference between failure and success. And with expertise also comes experience and this is a second element where OCEM Airfield has gained quite some traction.

Check out the OCEM Airfield ILCMS solution here or contact us here to understand how we can help realize your project.

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