Seat-Level Digital Twins: Scaling ArcGIS Indoors and Public Safety for Multi-Tiered Arenas
The Skinny
- Goal: Bring 93 municipal buildings and the 260,000 sq. ft. Dignity Health Arena into a single ArcGIS Enterprise environment.
- The Challenge: 2D floor plans fail when applied to the overlapping concourses and sloped seating bowls of a massive entertainment venue.
- The Approach: Captured the arena with mobile LiDAR, processed it into a Revit BIM model, and fed it directly into an ArcGIS Indoors network.
- Public Safety: The routing-aware spatial data powers S/Planner, allowing security teams to simulate evacuations and spot bottlenecks without disrupting daily operations.
From City Blocks to the Arena Floor
The City of Bakersfield’s Technology Services Division set out to modernize how it manages and navigates its facilities portfolio — spanning 93 city buildings and one of its most complex venues, the 260,000 sq. ft. Dignity Health Arena. The goal: a unified indoor mapping platform capable of supporting operations, wayfinding, and future smart-facility initiatives.
Working with geoConvergence, the project team implemented the ArcGIS Indoors Information Model across the City’s facilities and deployed ArcGIS Indoors within a production ArcGIS Enterprise environment. For most sites, existing GIS-based floor plan datasets were migrated through CAD into the Indoors information model. The Dignity Health Arena, however, required a different approach. Unlike standard buildings with flat floors and predictable hallways, the arena is a massive, continuous volume and accurately representing that physical reality inside the City’s GIS demanded a true digital twin.
The Anatomy of an Arena
When looking at the physical makeup of a stadium, it becomes obvious why standard indoor mapping methods break down. An arena is a layered, highly complex structure designed to move thousands of people at once.
There are restricted access zones for talent and staff, alongside VIP tiers with dedicated elevators. Wide vendor concourses intersect with steep, sloped seating bowls, creating constantly overlapping pathways. A 2D floor plan cannot accurately represent a staircase that cuts through three different zones, nor can it map the line of sight from a security checkpoint to a specific seating section. Flattening a stadium onto a piece of paper or a standard CAD file completely removes the spatial context required to manage the building.
Why Spatial Clarity Matters
Relying on legacy CAD files keeps facility teams anchored to static reference drawings. When managing a complex building, 2D maps simply fail to provide the necessary spatial context for efficient daily operations.
ArcGIS Indoors transforms this static data into an active operational engine. By establishing true spatial clarity, facility managers gain an intelligent, routing-aware network. Instead of spending time navigating layered mechanical spaces to find an asset, field workers are routed straight to their target, turning an accurate 3D map into an immediate operational advantage.
Engineering the Space
Capturing this level of detail meant bypassing legacy floor plans entirely. Our field team scanned the entire arena with mobile LiDAR, capturing the exact, current conditions of the building. That point cloud was converted into a highly detailed Revit model, establishing the structural framework, the concourses, and the tiered seating.
That 3D model then served as the direct source for the ArcGIS Indoors dataset. Instead of mapping massive seating sections as solid, un-routable blocks, we modeled every single seating row as an individual room unit polygon. The resulting map creates a continuous routing network that guides a user from a specific exterior gate, through the interior corridors, and directly to a single seat.
Built for Public Safety
When spatial data reaches this level of accuracy, it becomes the foundational geometry for public safety and scenario planning.
Knowing the layout of the concourse is helpful; knowing exactly how crowds will move through it during an evacuation saves lives. Because the indoor map is routing-aware, it feeds directly into S/Planner, geoConvergence’s proprietary emergency scenario simulator.
This allows security directors to use the 3D model to run virtual evacuation drills and watch groups move through the digital twin. The software tracks the analytics — measuring cumulative egress over time and calculating exactly how long it takes a crowd to clear a specific section. It immediately highlights physical bottlenecks in stairwells or corridors before an event ever takes place.
Most importantly, safety teams can run a hundred different virtual scenarios without ever having to close the arena or conduct a physical drill.
A Single Pane of Glass
The success of the Dignity Health Arena project goes beyond the walls of the stadium itself. The true achievement for the City of Bakersfield is the portfolio-wide integration.
Whether a city planner needs to check the space utilization of a standard 3rd-floor HR office downtown, or a security director needs to review the egress route from a seat in the upper bowl of the arena, they do it in the exact same system. By converting 93 municipal buildings and a complex venue into the ArcGIS Indoors Information Model, the city achieved a single pane of glass for their entire facility portfolio.
They no longer have to jump between disconnected software platforms or dig through paper archives. The data is centralized, routing-aware, and ready to support everything from daily maintenance to life-saving emergency response.
