The Power Of Smart Street Lights in Smart City
Smart street lighting can help cities save money and enhance service and public safety, but there are privacy concerns. Intelligent street light is one of the core elements of smart city.
Cities can replace old street lights with more energy-efficient LED bulbs, and use wireless connectivity to activate the street's motion sensors when passers-by approach, and automatically alert city authorities when bulbs need to be replaced. Smart street lighting can also enhance public safety through network monitoring and environmental monitoring.
The global installation of smart street lights is expected to grow from 10.4 million units at the end of 2018 to 31.2 million units in 2023, according to a recent research report by Iot analytics firm Berg Insight.
"The smart street light market is currently undergoing significant transformation and is entering a new era of competition, where vendors' success will depend on their ability to become strong providers of communications and management platforms for smart city equipment," said Levi Ostling, iot analyst at Berg Insight.
What is intelligent street lighting system?
Smart city street lamps, which have been widely upgraded to LED bulbs, consume far less energy than traditional incandescent bulbs. Cities can reduce energy use by up to 50 percent through iot lighting, according to a smart street lamp supplier.
Managing streetlights remotely, or automatically dimming or turning them off based on nearby activity, can save cities money. LED lights are also brighter than traditional lights, improving public safety by making traditionally dark areas of the city brighter. Meanwhile, as the Smart City Lab website notes, Smart lighting has been recognized as "one of the most feasible and easily implemented technologies for cities to transition to a low-carbon economy and peak emissions over the next decade."
The site notes that LED light posts are also "ideal infrastructure for installing smart city systems" and that "when used for networking and surveillance, they serve as a sensor platform, further improving efficiency and providing vital data for countless urban solutions."
Streetlights of the future will not just illuminate streets at night. Smart street lights can support solar power generation, digital signage, environmental monitoring (temperature, humidity, flood conditions, air quality) and traffic monitoring. The data collected by these sensor networks can support many urban services and initiatives on a single public infrastructure: from law enforcement to environmental improvements, traffic monitoring and earthquake preparedness.
What is intelligent street lamp management system?
A smart street light system includes a set of street lights that "can communicate with each other and provide lighting data to a local concentrator," according to Embedded wireless company Radiocrafts.
The concentrator then "manages the relevant data and transfers it to a secure server, which captures the data and displays it on a Web browser dashboard."
The smart street lamp management system also incorporates two-way communication, allowing utilities or facilities managers to "remotely monitor street lamps while simultaneously tracking the lamps and their power consumption." This monitoring helps reduce maintenance costs because each street lamp has a specific ID and can be accurately located. If the connected streetlight breaks down or falls over due to weather or a malfunction, city workers can schedule maintenance for that particular lamppost.
Street lamp monitoring system can provide automatic street lamp maintenance. According to a research paper in the International Journal of Engineering and Technology, light sensors can be built into all street lamp circuits and are responsible for automatically turning streetlights on and off.
Once the lights are turned on, a current sensor installed in each street lamp circuit reports the status of the lights to the central system via a GSM wireless module connected to the circuit. This data is sent back and maintenance crews can easily be dispatched to faulty streetlights.
"The system also maintains a database that stores useful information from each street lamp, such as power consumption, total hours of illumination, total number of outages, and details of fault detection," the paper notes.
What is intelligent street lighting system?
Smart city street lamps, which have been widely upgraded to LED bulbs, consume far less energy than traditional incandescent bulbs. Cities can reduce energy use by up to 50 percent through iot lighting, according to a smart street lamp supplier.
Managing streetlights remotely, or automatically dimming or turning them off based on nearby activity, can save cities money. LED lights are also brighter than traditional lights, improving public safety by making traditionally dark areas of the city brighter. Meanwhile, as the Smart City Lab website notes, Smart lighting has been recognized as "one of the most feasible and easily implemented technologies for cities to transition to a low-carbon economy and peak emissions over the next decade."
The site notes that LED light posts are also "ideal infrastructure for installing smart city systems" and that "when used for networking and surveillance, they serve as a sensor platform, further improving efficiency and providing vital data for countless urban solutions."
Streetlights of the future will not just illuminate streets at night. Smart street lights can support solar power generation, digital signage, environmental monitoring (temperature, humidity, flood conditions, air quality) and traffic monitoring. The data collected by these sensor networks can support many urban services and initiatives on a single public infrastructure: from law enforcement to environmental improvements, traffic monitoring and earthquake preparedness.
What is intelligent street lamp management system?
A smart street light system includes a set of street lights that "can communicate with each other and provide lighting data to a local concentrator," according to Embedded wireless company Radiocrafts.
The concentrator then "manages the relevant data and transfers it to a secure server, which captures the data and displays it on a Web browser dashboard."
The smart street lamp management system also incorporates two-way communication, allowing utilities or facilities managers to "remotely monitor street lamps while simultaneously tracking the lamps and their power consumption." This monitoring helps reduce maintenance costs because each street lamp has an ID and can be accurately located. If the connected streetlight breaks down or falls over due to weather or a malfunction, city workers can schedule maintenance for that particular lamppost.
Street lamp monitoring system can provide automatic street lamp maintenance. According to a research paper in the International Journal of Engineering and Technology, light sensors can be built into all street lamp circuits and are responsible for automatically turning streetlights on and off.
Once the lights are turned on, a current sensor installed in each street lamp circuit reports the status of the lights to the central system via a GSM wireless module connected to the circuit. This data is sent back and maintenance crews can easily be dispatched to faulty streetlights.
"The system also maintains a database that stores useful information from each street lamp, such as power consumption, total hours of illumination, total number of outages, and details of fault detection," the paper notes.
How do smart city street lamps protect public safety?
Smart cities and police departments are using smart street lights to help fight crime, respond to emergencies and better serve their citizens.
David Graham, an innovation officer in Carlsbad, Calif., and a former operations officer in San Diego, told IEEE Spectrum in 2018 that smart street lights with sensors can detect certain sounds in order to "automatically alert police to dangerous situations by recognizing the sound of broken glass or car crashes."
Public safety officials "are able to monitor intersections and record when there is a traffic jam -- information that can be used to adjust traffic lights."
Coolidge Park, located along the riverfront in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, has benefited from the addition of smart LED streetlights, according to a post by the Smart Cities Council. "The park is notoriously unsafe and gang congregations sometimes lead to knife fights. But the city worked with Global Green Lighting, a local company, to install smart street lights that can be controlled remotely to make them bright, dim or flash. When the lights flickered, the gangs scattered, and over time the park returned to calm.
In addition, smart lighting systems can include built-in speakers that can be "used to broadcast public radio announcements during emergencies, or simply play music to enhance the ambience of public Spaces," the Smart Cities Council noted.
How to combine intelligent street lamp with monitoring?
Using surveillance cameras embedded in smart street lights, cities can "monitor traffic conditions and speeds to adjust traffic signals or alert drivers via digital signage," Buck writes in Dive for Smart Cities. He also noted that smart lampposts "may also help identify suspicious behavior or enable license plate recognition."
David Nisleit, San Diego's police chief, said the city's smart street lights, with embedded cameras, were a "game changer" in helping find suspects.
"We use them very carefully and only for the most serious cases, very violent cases or serious or fatal injury collisions," Nislett told the San Diego Union-Tribune. But we have the ability to use them as a response tool, as a line of inquiry. Critics, however, say San Diego's street lights also collect data on pedestrian activity, potentially putting citizens' data at risk.
Urban Innovation Non-profit organization CIV: Simon Sylvester-Chaudhuri, executive director of LAB, said on the Samsung Next blog that to mitigate privacy concerns, cities "need to establish advanced controls to protect citizens' data and be transparent about who has access to it and how it is used."
