Energy-Efficient Intelligent Street Lighting System Using Traffic-Adaptive Control

Lighting, both indoor and outdoor, consumes a substantial amount of energy, making improved efficiency a significant challenge. A promising approach to address outdoor lighting is the smart control of public lighting. Smart lighting using electronically controlled light-emitting diode (LED) lights for adaptable illumination and monitoring is being used to achieve an energy efficient system. However, the traffic engineering integrated with smart control for energy optimization has not been widely used. In this paper, a novel concept of traffic-flow-based smart (LED) street lighting for energy optimization is proposed. The developed smart grid architecture-based system uses low power ZigBee mesh network to provide maximum energy efficiency in response to adaptive traffic on the road. Moreover, the scalable wireless network of smart LED lights offers improved reliability, reduced cost, and more user satisfaction. In order to validate the performance, the proposed system was implemented and tested in a real environment inside a university campus. Experimental results show that in comparison with the replaced conventional metal halide lighting, our system is capable of 68%-82% energy savings depending on the variations in daylight hours between summer and winter. A significant reduction in greenhouse gases, improved overall system reliability, and reduced maintenance due to smart control suggests promising results for future wide-area deployment.