FC Barcelona and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) have completed the first phase of the IoTwins project, an innovative system that applies the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence to analyse and predict the movement of people inside and outside the facilities of the Club. Once developed, will allow improved management of mainly the mobility of the visitors and the offer of services.
The results of this first year of implementation of the project, together with a look at what the stadiums of the future will be like, are two of the highlights that will be addressed today in two of the panels of the Sports for Tomorrow Congress organised by the Barça Innovation Hub, FC Barcelona's innovation research and knowledge dissemination platform.
The IoTwins project consists of modelling the movements of people passing through the club's facilities by collecting anonymous data and creating a computer simulation that reproduces the usual movements of the public.
This system will provide information that will allow real-time decisions to be made to optimally manage, once the public can return to the stadium, the use of the facilities - facilitating the movement of people, anticipating crowds or organising emergency plans- the offer of leisure and services as well as the rearrangement of space during the construction process of the Espai Barça.
In the course of this first year, construction has begun on the digital twin, which will be used to simulate the movements of the different profiles of users who visit the club's facilities and is based on Pandora technology, a social simulation software developed at BSC. To create these typologies, historical data of the club have been collected regarding how they access the venue and the different areas in which visitors move in the facilities.
On the other hand, FC Barcelona and the BSC are working to adapt this tool to support the management of the gradual return of the public to the facilities, when the authorities allow it. This would be done by incorporating a transmission model of COVID-19 into the simulations, which would allow them to analyse different ways of regulating the entrance of public to the stage and to see which one adapts better to the measures of security - distance between spectators, capacity restrictions- established by the health authorities.
Crowd Management of the Club - the basis of this project
FC Barcelona and BSC are developing this initiative within the framework of the IoTwins project, funded by the European Commission and part of the Horizon 2020 program, the most important in innovation in the European Union, after presenting a proposal in an open call that was valued very positively by the EC and which allowed the Club and BSC to be part of the group of 23 entities that form the IoTwins project.
