Public lighting design and the IoT

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Public lighting design and the IoT

© James Newton

By Jonathan Weinert

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© James Newton

Much has changed for lighting specifiers since scientists Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura made the first blue LEDs in the early 1990s. By the time they received the Nobel Prize for their innovation in 2014, LED technology had ushered in the first proper lighting revolution for a hundred years. Specifiers had to expand their lighting design grammar and vocabulary significantly, but they got a whole host of new capabilities in return.

Now energy-efficient, dynamic LED light, both color-changing and white, is everywhere. That’s enough change for one century, right?

Not on your life. As if LED technology wasn’t disruptive enough, a second revolution came right on its heels: connected lighting. Today, a working knowledge of LED lighting is no longer sufficient: lighting specifiers who want to play in the connected world must also know something about computer

networking, communications technology, and data analytics—in short, all of the capabilities that make up what is known as the Internet of Things (IoT).

The Internet of illuminated things Connected lighting stands at the intersection of digital lighting and the IoT. Any light source can be controlled digitally, but only LED luminaires are inherently digital, lending themselves to participation in the IoT. Simply put, a connected luminaire is capable of two-way data communications: lighting commands in, from a controller or software program, and operational and sensor data out. Like all connected devices, connected luminaires can use any of the available standard forms of data communication: wired Ethernet, Wi-Fi (wireless Ethernet), Bluetooth, Zigbee, cellular—and often do so in combination.

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Connected luminaires report on their status and operations, allowing remote monitoring and automatic fault notifications for correcting outages quickly and efficiently. Data from sensors can paint a detailed picture of an illuminated space over time: occupancy, activities, temperature, humidity, light levels, noise levels—anything, really, that a sensor can detect.

A platform for success Of course, if your lighting system is transmitting data, that data has to go somewhere, and something has to be done with it to make it useful. This is where an IoT platform comes into play.

Sometimes on-premise, but more frequently in the cloud, the typical IoT platform features a data lake—a scalable repository for ingesting system data—and some form of data analytics, to process raw data and render it meaningful either to other systems or to human beings, who can use the insights it brings to improve their organization’s ways of working.

Š James Newton

Illuminated River, London, United Kingdom The Illuminated River project, which makes full use of the color-changing capabilities of LED luminaires from Color Kinetics, would be complex to manage and maintain without Interact Landmark’s lighting asset management software. The project, which will light up 15 bridges over the River Thames in London by 2022, has been designed by the world-renowned light artist Leo Villareal. Villareal first achieved success with implementing a massive public art project with his work with the Bay Lights in San Francisco. There, he created a monumental light sculpture using 25,000 white LEDs on the suspension cables of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. In London, he applied his extraordinary artistic abilities to weave together historic, cultural, social, and environmental requirements to beautiful effect.

Of course, all of this beauty is achieved only with a certain amount of effort. Each individually controllable light point is individually coded, labeled, and installed according to a detailed light map that Interact Landmark uses to coordinate the stunning lighting effects. Once the light map is in place, Interact Landmark asset management software reduces operational costs by allowing system managers to remotely monitor, automatically detect, and rapidly troubleshoot faults in the system.

Artist Leo Villareal Studio Architect Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands Consulting Engineer Atelier Ten Luminaires Color Kinetics IoT system Interact Landmark Websites www.villareal.net www.lds-uk.com www.atelierten.com www.interact-lighting.com

© Derryck Menere Photography

Shanghai façades and transportation, China Several leading lighting designers, notably Charles Stone of Fisher Marantz Stone, in collaboration with Unolai Lighting Design & Associates, developed the concept for reimagining the lighting in the Shanghai Bund, a historical waterfront district, encompassing three bridges and 77 buildings in the financial and tourist districts.

Stone’s vision had the benefit of the people of Shanghai in mind from the start. Rather than turning the city into “one large medium definition television set,” the design uses shades of white light only, using tunable white luminaires from Color Kinetics and Philips ranging in CCT from about 1800K to 3000K. This approach is “sympathetic to the stately historic facades,” in Stone’s words, and “celebrates the richness of the architecture.” The coordination of more

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than 20,000 tunable white light points to create a ribbon of effects across 27 contiguous buildings would simply not be possible without LED fixtures and digital controls.

While Stone rightly cites the project’s “innovation in control strategy and implementation,” the capabilities are more about the control of the world’s largest implementation of connected architectural lighting. The control network connects the lighting on the Shanghai Bund buildings, rooftops in the Pudong area, and the Yangpu, Nanpu, and Xupu bridges. Its Interact Landmark system is being used to control and manage lighting on building rooftops and the three bridges.

Lighting designers Fisher Marantz Stone Unolai Lighting Design & Associates Tungsten Studio Lighting Design Shanghai Luoman Lighting Technologies Inc. Landscape Lighting Management Institute, Huangpu District Shanghai Tongji Architectural Design (Group) Co., Ltd. Shanghai Xian Dai Architectural Design (Group) Co., Ltd. Luminaires Color Kinetics ColorReach Powercore gen2 Color Kinetics eW Reach Powercore gen2 Philips UniFlood Philips UniStrip IoT system Interact Landmark Websites www.fmsp.com www.unolai.com www.tungstensld.com www.shluoman.cn www.tjadri.com www.xd-ad.com.cn www.interact-lighting.com

The greatest advantage of all, however, may be the fact that a well-designed IoT platform gives you all of these capabilities in a userfriendly, turnkey implementation. If your goal is driving, it’s easier to buy a car, rather than the parts.

Reasons to care Very little of the story around IoT platforms has to do with illumination, so why, as a lighting specifier, should you care? Isn’t lighting design fundamentally the same as it always was?

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© UDLA

© UDLA © UDLA

IoT platforms offer many more advantages for connected lighting systems, including software suites for system and application management, dashboards and apps for controlling and reporting, security measures to protect systems and data from cyberattacks, and APIs, which application developers can use to rapidly build new applications to extend your system capabilities or integrate connected lighting with other smart systems in a building or a city.

Fortunately, the short answer to this last question is yes. Connected lighting may have some limited influence on how you might specify fixtures based on illumination capabilities, but its importance lies elsewhere, in what you might call the nonlighting benefits of data-enabled lighting.

With the trend toward sustainable operations and smart buildings, more and more customers are demanding low energy consumption levels that only connected LED lighting systems can achieve. And with the rise of as-a-service models, specifiers are more often asked to hit uptime and organizational efficiency targets that require real-time monitoring and data-rich alerts.

System design, with its emphasis on flexibility, integration, and openness, hasn’t replaced traditional measures of lighting quality such as CRI, light output, and color uniformity; rather, it has added and entirely new dimension that must be taken into consideration.

Taking it public While connected lighting systems may be even more complex in offices, retail shops, and industrial spaces—indoor positioning and space management are only two of the many applications that really have no corollary outdoors—public lighting offers some of the best examples of the powerful combination of superior lighting design and connected capabilities.

The Shanghai Bund project and London’s Illuminated River installation both combine the capabilities of Interact Landmark, connected lighting software specifically designed for bridges, monuments, and facades, and lighting design from some of the talented light artists in the world.

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