Manly Council on Sydney’s northern beaches is considering how it might be able to harness Internet of Things technology for crowd control at major events.

The council is already feeding CCTV vision from certain parking areas – such as bus parking near the beach - through Azure Machine Learning to analyse and manage the use of these spaces.

But the council hopes to expand its use of the analytics technology to community safety, where it could be used “to recognise crowd patterns and trigger public place management protocols and safety evacuation plans.”

“The Internet of Things is useful for initiatives like people counting, where we have software deployed that looks through our [CCTV] cameras and counts the number of people that walk by,” the council’s chief information officer Nathan Rogers said.

“This creates data that we can present to the Chamber of Commerce, people who are interested in starting a business in Manly and people who run big events in Manly like the Hurley Australian Open.”

Azure IoT Suite generally available

Azure Machine Learning is one component of a package of Microsoft products called the Azure IoT Suite that the vendor has made available for purchase from today.

The Azure IoT Suite includes Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Machine Learning and PowerBI.com.

The tools come “pre-configured” to support certain IoT applications.

The first configuration is for a remote monitoring application, with “predictive maintenance and asset management solutions” to come down the track.

The Azure IoT Suite had been under preview after it was unveiled at the Microsoft Convergence 2015 conference earlier this year.

The suite builds on learnings from an earlier tool called Azure Intelligent Systems Service, announced in April 2014.