How Much Do You Know About Smart Street Lighting?

Nowadays, street lights can be seen everywhere in cities and countries. They not only provide lighting for roads at night to ensure pedestrians safety and safe driving of cars, but also become a beautiful landscape that adds color to the areas.

With the continuous development and progress of lighting technology, street lights have become more and more intelligent, energy-efficient and low-cost. At present, as an important carrier of the smart city, smart street lights integrate various urban infrastructure and new facilities and multiple city functions, and perceive, analyze, and integrate various key information of the city′s operating system through the use of information and communication technology, achieving the intelligence of urban services and management.

In this article, we will take a look at how smart street lights are implemented.

What′s smart street lighting?

There is no doubt that the invention of lights makes our lives convenient, and the existence of street lights makes our night life safer as well as more interesting. The emergence and development of smart street lights is not only the progress of civilization and technology, but also the necessity for the long-term development of society, because it combines the functions of energy saving and consumption reduction, environmental protection and the efficient, orderly and safe development of cities life.

Smart street light is a more intelligent and technical street light. It not only has the function of specific lighting, but also combines technologies such as cameras, photoelectric cells and other sensors to achieve real-time monitoring functions. Therefore, smart street lights are also called adaptive lighting or intelligent street lighting. This lighting system is an important step in the development of smart cities.

The intelligent street light pole is the basic component of a smart street lighting system. It’s made of three following components:

1. Highest efficient LED or HID lamps. By using these high performance luminous sources, assuring specific values of luminance, dimness, uniformity, and glare according to the road type in order to guarantee maximum visual safety to pedestrians.

2. IoT-based communication to create digitally monitored, secure, and reliable network. The communication is bi-directional, and the monitored system can send and receive information from the light; while a facility manager is able to adjust the lighting system depending on an abundance of information.

3. Addition of various smart sensors to monitor weather conditions, the flow of people and cars, air pollution, light inclination and more. And with such information detected by sensors, we can enhance road safety and reduce costs in maintenance.

How they works?

Generally speaking, base on different functions and requirements, smart street lights may use different technologies, but they all involve a combination of cameras and sensors. These devices can detect the movement of objects to achieve dynamic lighting and dimming. It also allows adjacent lights to communicate with each other. If a pedestrian or car is detected, all the surrounding lights will turn on until no more motion is captured.

After the smart street light is installed, it is necessary to build a control center and install a software system to collect any data collected by the street light so as to adjust its functions, such as dimming time.

What are the advantages?

There are lots of advantages of using smart street lights in cities and countrysides:

1. They can adjust lighting brightness intelligently, which helps reduce energy costs and usage.
2. Reduce carbon emissions and light pollution. The materials used on street lights and the working process will not pollute or damage the environment.
3. Be able to perform air pollution detection, haze prediction and so on.
4. Help reduce and detect traffic accidents through the statistics of the flow of people and vehicles, thus help lower the accident rate.
5. Provide security alarm function, which plays an important role in effectively reducing criminal behavior.
6. Cut down maintenance costs with the help of monitoring software.

With above obvious benefits, using smart street lights seems to be the best way for cities or countrysides street lighting. In fact, we have great challenges in the popularization and application of smart street lights.

1. Although the smart lighting pole can realize all the management functions in the city, under the current urban management system, the more functions, the more management departments involved, which means that the coordination in different city systems is more difficult.

2. The unqualified manufacturing process of some enterprises has hidden dangers for the safe use of light poles, and has adverse effects on the comprehensive application of smart light poles in the future, and causes secondary waste.

3. The industrial design of intelligent lighting pole is not strong, and the shape is not beautiful. The mechanical interface and electrical interface are not standard, such as the appearance of the light pole on the road is not uniform when installing relevant equipment.