Smart Stadium

Within the Smart Stadium use case symbIoTe is used to leverage all IoT platforms and devices available at the stadium providing added value services that enhance the fan experience.

Stadiums are not anymore the place where you go just to watch your favourite sport match. Instead, new Smart Stadiums can provide you with a complete experience around the sport event, which starts even much before you arrive to the stadium, and continues when you are back at home. Stadium managers are perfectly aware of the direct and indirect benefits that they can get through the provision of those added value services that enhance the fan experience.

Another common usage of Stadium venues is hosting large concerts or other musical events (such as musical festivals) where concerts do have similar patterns to sporting events (short duration of up to few hours), but music festivals often last for longer periods of time – both within the day, but can also span multiple days. For most showcases and workflows there are no significant differences in services provided between the two (music and sport events) but where differences exist they are noted. However, the provision of those services require the use of several technologies based on different IoT infrastructures, either permanently installed in the stadium or deployed or made available for a specific event, in any case perfectly integrated and powered through symbIoTe-enabled applications.

In order to showcase the different technologies involved and how they take advantage of symbIoTe developments, the Smart Stadium use case is focused on the enhanced stadium visitor experience in the following areas:

Indoor location services: take advantage of the specific location of the visitor to make specific promotions, or provide location-based information.

Information on available services, offered by the stadium manager: which services are available, their location, how and when to reach them, their conditions and cost.

Specific care is needed in case of emergency services which are also offered either by stadium manager or organization – primarily locating and notifying emergency services provided on site (emergency medical teams and security personnel) – this kind of services are specially needed in (electronic) music festivals due to higher incidence of both security or medical emergencies.

Alerts and Promotional platforms: third parties operating the added value services have the possibility to make general promotions, or specifically and contextually driven campaigns. In addition to the direct information in the different applications, visitors may be made aware of these promotions through alert systems.

Remote ordering services: visitors may send orders to the providers of the added value services, which receive them and process in advance. These services are key to optimize the stadium operation, for example by dramatically reducing the queues of people trying to access the added value service.

All these services, and many more that can be defined in the scope of Smart Stadium solutions, require the interaction with different IoT independent platforms that would require very complex programming and adaptation to the characteristics of the specific platforms deployed in each stadium. For example, any location based service will require interacting with a geolocation/indoor location service, which implementation may dramatically change from one stadium to another (open air stadiums where at least some areas are covered with GPS positioning or closed halls/arenas which fully require indoor location service), while this will happen seamlessly with symbIoTe enabled platforms.

The Smart Stadium show cases focuses on the visitor user experience when interacting with the different IoT platforms available throughout the stadium. The following user story illustrates the show cases:

Today the city football team is playing a very important match in their large stadium against one of the most important teams in the country. The stadium is very crowded, in fact completely full, and the match organizers have contracted many added value service providers to complement their incomes by selling a large diversity of extra services to the stadium visitors, such as food and beverages moving carts, souvenir kiosks, information desks, and advertising panels. Most of these services are provided by third parties, and it is essential for them to reach as many customers as possible while optimizing all their resources: they must look attractive to visitors, but at the same time, the service must be easy and quick to reach, and delivery must be very efficient. This service optimization will be achieved thanks to the different IoT infrastructures installed in the stadium, perfectly integrated and powered through symbIoTe-enabled applications.

Family Smith, composed of Tom (45), Alice (42) and their son John (10), are all enthusiastic supporters of their city football team, and today they have come to the city stadium to watch the most important match of the year. In their way to their seats, they find several interactive panels with information about the stadium and many interesting offers. Alice discovers that there is a limited offer of T-shirts of their team from one of the souvenir kiosks, the first twenty ones at half price. She knows that John would love one of his favorite player, so she uses the stadium app to get an electronic coupon that guarantees the discount if redeemed in less than 30 minutes, and with the stadium app immediately purchases the T-shirt with the included discount. While Alice has got the coupon and then purchased the T-shirt, the kiosk owner has received the different orders in his symbIoTe-enabled retailer terminal and prepared John’s T-shirt. Now they can easily go to the kiosk to just pick-up the T-shirt with no queues.

The match is very interesting, but when the first half is almost finished, they are starting to feel thirsty and hungry. They know that there are several moving beverage and food carts around the stadium, but do not know exactly where they can find them and will not have too much time during halftime, so they open their stadium app, look there for the closest cart, and order immediately their drinks and sandwiches. Their order is received at the retailer terminal of the beverage and food cart, where the cart owner acknowledges it, thus automatically generating an electronic ticket in Tom’s app, which he will use to pick-up the order.

The Smart Stadium application will take advantage of the following symbIoTe-enabled IoT platforms:

Users Platform. This platform comprises all the visitors’ devices (smartphones, tablets) that have been registered through the Smart Stadium app. The platform manages these devices as IoT devices that a third party can locate and access.

Beacons Platform. This platform takes care of the underlying beacons distributed throughout the stadium.

smartStadium3 Promotion and Information Platform. This platform manages all devices that display promotions and that can be used to consume those promotions. It aims at interacting with visitors, providing them information coming from the stadium manager, promotions coming from services providers, or alerts coming from any of them.

Remote Ordering Platform. The remote ordering platform manages retailer devices (kiosk and moving carts), and published promotions and coupons. It aims at interacting with visitors through the stadium app, usually to place orders, and with service providers through specific devices located at their place.

Mobile/Wireless Access Network Platform. Apart from beacon-based indoor geolocation, mobile and wireless LAN networks can also be used as a method for indoor location, or can supplement the beacon-based system. Mobile access networks use complex small-cell systems (Distributed Antenna Systems, micro-cells and pico-cells) which can provide geolocation (cell identifiers can be used by Smart Stadium app to provide geolocation even without any integration with mobile network Operation Support Systems).

Involved partners	Worldline Vipnet
Countries involved in the trials	Spain Croatia
Platforms involved (not finalized)	User platform Beacon platform Worldline Promowall Remote ordering Mobile/wireless access network (optional)
Number of test users planned	25+

This scenario is still in the implementation phase and the symbIoTe partners Worldline and Vipnet are working to finalize it. In any case the trials will be using beacons (BLE) and wireless networks for indoor location of users and third party businesses such as kiosks and moving cart retailers, promowall panels and remote ordering devices that allow retailers to activate promotions and visitors to read them and interact with them.