3 minute read
Simplifying Sequence of Operations
from Oct/Nov 2025
By Craig DiLouie, LC, CLCP
Craig DiLouie is education director for the Lighting Controls Academy.
A good lighting design requires a good lighting controls design. As lighting control systems become more sophisticated to meet energy codes and offer significantly greater value in today’s lighting solutions, best practices become increasingly essential.
These include the Control Intent Narrative (CIN) and Sequence of Operations (SOO). Let’s examine why these are so important, along with a new free resource from the Lighting Controls Academy that can help lighting practitioners adopt them.
Modern lighting control systems offer a great deal of capabilities, while building projects subject to energy codes require detailed solutions. More requirements and capabilities in turn demand heightened diligence, ensuring the right solution is selected, and verifying the system performs according to intent.
Communicating the design intent to the team is essential, and the Illuminating Engineering Society’s LP-16 defines two best-practice documents for this: the CIN and SOO. Using both can guide design teams, installers, and programmers, especially on complex projects.
The CIN generally outlines the project goals and control strategies to express design intent. The CIN is a non-technical document written for the owner and design team. Once approved, it becomes the basis for the SOO.
The SOO takes the CIN to the level of actionable detail. Where the CIN is general, the sequence of operations provides detail—specific, measurable, and enforceable, refining the CIN into measurable outcomes. It translates intent into defined triggers (inputs) and functions (outputs), including details such as how devices are organized and connected (architecture/topology), setpoints (e.g., brightness, timeouts), and scenes. For example, if a sensor no longer detects occupancy in an office, the lights switch off after 20 minutes. Advanced SOOs may combine multiple triggers and sequences for various control points.
Because SOOs can involve extensive data, a matrix often makes sense to express the sequence of operations. While there is no gold standard for documenting an SOO, a matrix can often be useful. This matrix juxtaposes general space types and/or specific spaces against control strategies and other parameters. ANSI/IES LP-16 discusses this approach and provides an example aligning spaces with control strategies and system requirements.
Adhering to best practices requires a time investment. As energy codes steadily raise baselines and make minimally compliant control solutions more sophisticated, clear control operation descriptions are needed. Designers, however, need to be able to create them efficiently. Otherwise, there is an inhibition to adopt them and then to explore more advanced control capabilities and solutions.
The Lighting Controls Academy developed templates to help lighting practitioners describe CIN and SOO more efficiently. Produced by lighting designer C. Webster Marsh with extensive manufacturer input, these free Excel-based, editable templates cover 10 common building types with prepopulated fields reflecting compliance with the 2024 International Energy Conservation Code. These requirements are presented in clear, quick-reference matrices that double as CIN and SOO documents.
Overall, these templates—dubbed Design Express and available at LightingControlsAcademy.org under the “Learn” tab—remove the heavy lifting of starting from scratch with CIN/SOO documentation. They are published for educational use but can be adapted for real projects.
Try it out. Using CIN and SOO best practices ensures that control systems are properly selected, installed, and programmed to meet both energy codes and owner needs. While developing these documents can be time-consuming, standardized templates can make the process faster and easier.
