AFL GRAND FINAL WEEKEND
Statement of Works
The Australian Football League (AFL) engaged CommandPost® to provide a mission-critical, multi-stakeholder, solution for the coordination and real-time monitoring of AFL Grand Final Parade and Grand Final activation sites.
These events brought dynamic crowd movements, live broadcast coverage, and diverse stakeholder responsibilities, demanding an environment that required real-time understanding, proactive management, and seamless collaboration between multiple stakeholders.
CommandPost® operationalised the AFL’s Command, Control, Communication and Coordination (C4) framework by integrating AFL management, emergency services, local government, landowners, and production teams across multiple control rooms. The solution introduced an intuitive interface that established a common operating picture of activity, which ensured coordinated actions, enhanced understanding, improved collaboration and informed decision-making. This resulted in accountability of stakeholders, and maintained operational efficiency across a dynamic environment of an outdoor event.
CommandPost® provisioned hardware to establish a real-time GPS tracking overlay, shown alongside detailed geocoded site plans, for stakeholders to maintain continuous visibility of parade movements. This capability enabled teams to take proactive steps on security deployments, traffic/road coordination, policing presence, and for stakeholders to ensure adherence with both crowd plans and production schedules. This capability further equipped teams with the ability to anticipate crowd flow movements, identify disruptions, and to proactively disseminate public advisory messaging via security and production personnel.
Critical alerts from official authorities, including VicEmergency, VicRoads, and the Bureau of Meteorology, were streamed directly into CommandPost® and consolidated to provide situational understanding. This equipped stakeholders with real-time visibility of external threats, directly informing control room decision-making and operational adjustments. Finally, the integration of zone maps, grid plans, geocoded site plans, and emergency-service-compatible mapping, established a common referencing system to enable faster, coordinated responses across stakeholders.
A live CCTV feed, offering a real-time visual of crowd movements between the event and primary transport hub, was streamed directly within the CommandPost® interface, to inform teams of expected crowd volume and surges during both ingress and egress. CommandPost® also had integration with the AFL Grand Final live broadcast, giving teams an additional layer of situational awareness, which enabled teams to take proactive steps around key timings and to receive immediate notification of media coverage in the event of an unfolding major incident.
CommandPost® has set a new benchmark in multi-stakeholder coordination, removing information silos and enabling seamless communication across key stakeholders. This has gone a long way in providing enhanced situational awareness and unified decision-making for managing the complexity of a multi-stakeholder, outdoor event site.
About: AFL Grand Final Weekend
The AFL Grand Final weekend is held annually, featuring entertainment, parade, and activations. Both events require significant logistical coordination involving multiple government agencies, extensive security arrangements, road closures, and crowd management strategies.