Connected Lighting Smart Cities- Ensuring Sustainability besides Affordability

Public lighting is coined years ago and is installed almost everywhere: in living space, workspace, and play-area and also in mediums and places as they travel. Its primary function is to provide energy efficient, quality lighting to enhance public safety and quality of the urban landscape. However, in the future, a city’s lighting infrastructure will also offer enormous potential to be part of a city-wide network capable of acquiring data and delivering information and services to and from millions of devices, from garbage bins to autonomous vehicles. In this way, it could help enable smart city services to improve the lives of its citizens and city managers alike.

To meet the challenges of accelerating urbanization, municipalities must increasingly turn to intelligent management of services. Connected systems that make use of new data sharing and gathering capabilities are giving city and service managers more flexibility, control, and efficiency than ever before. Connected lighting systems that offer remote monitoring and intelligent management of all light points across a city can serve as agents of change, making lighting operations much more efficient and environmentally friendly while enhancing a city’s cultural and social life.

At the local level, sufficient and well-designed lighting cultivates a sense of security and peace of mind for citizens. Connected lighting systems give street lighting managers the ability to specifically target and optimize light levels and distribution in different areas of a city. When lighting brightly illuminates a street at night, eliminating dim sidewalks and dark corners, pedestrians feel more relaxed and more engaged in city life. When roadways and intersections are properly illuminated, drivers can get where they’re going with less confusion and fewer accidents.

Intelligently managed public lighting can enrich a city’s identity and cultural life. Beautifully illuminated streets, facades, and public spaces invite people to enjoy the city at night, supporting commerce and encouraging people to attend cultural events and special celebrations, both indoors and outdoors. Dynamic lighting experiences can join with thoughtful functional lighting to strengthen the sense of community within the city and the city’s brand on the global stage.

However, the future is all about Connected Lighting, which will be at the heart of Smart Cities of 2030. By the time, about 60% of people will live in cities and there will be close to 70 billion light points in the world. Many of these light points will be connected – sensor nodes in networks capable of acquiring, sending and receiving data. All this because public lighting is already available, has its own power source and offers a dense network of connection points it is an ideal infrastructure to support your city’s future IoT strategy. 

An open API will allow Connected Lighting to be integrated into your other city management systems and allows your existing partners or independent third parties to use it as a platform for future innovation and following benefits at large. 

Energy Optimization

With full control of your city lighting you can identify opportunities for further energy savings by dimming, scheduling and zoning. Interact City enables you to reduce CO2 emissions, meet sustainability targets and reduce costs, enabling you to reinvest the savings into other areas of your city’s infrastructure.

Scene Management

The ‘Connected Lighting’ concept will enable cities to use its lighting infrastructure to support commerce and improve life for citizens.

Use Scene Management to give parks, plazas, and landmarks a unique identity by lighting them in memorable and engaging ways. Enable your city lighting operator to program and manage dynamic light shows on one or multiple installations. 

Or enable retailers and event venues to extend their brand experience by giving access to control public lighting to support their business.

Lighting Asset Management

The concept remotely manages and monitor the city’s entire lighting system in real-time via one dashboard, with an additional scope to monitor the energy consumption, thus immediately identifying and locating, any faults if any and then trigger work orders and plan maintenance schedules.

Environmental Monitoring

Highly granular environmental data such as temperature, moisture and noise from streets and parks can be collected, extracted, stored and contextualized by Interact City connected lighting system and then used for city planning strategies.

Light on Demand strategies designed around adapting light levels to the density of people or movement in the street bring further opportunities to make lighting investments more sustainable and optimize use of resources

Incident Detection

Incident detection uses sensors on light poles to monitor and alert emergency services when unexpected traffic, sounds or crowd noise is detected. 

Sharing real-time data over the connected lighting system means you can respond to disturbances quickly and accurately. Over time, data collection supports predictive analytics, which helps in reducing crime and traffic accidents to create a greater sense of security in your city.

Outdoor lighting and IT are very different industries, Creating working systems that are part of both worlds is only possible through continuous software adaptation and delivery (a.k.a. SaaS).

By sharing costs of deployment across a large customer base, SaaS offerings end up being the most cost-effective (typically 60% less than on-premise)

Vivek Jain, GM, Signify India

Guest Author The author is is the General Manager Marketing-Public Urban & SmartCities, South Asia at Signify (formerly known as Philips Lighting India Ltd). He is an Experienced Lighting Professional in B2B & B2G Sales, Lighting Applications & Marketing functions. Currently Driving penetration of Connected Lighting ( #SmartLED ) systems in Public Urban Segment.