Intelligent street lighting refers to public street lighting that adapts to movement by pedestrians, cyclists and cars in a

smart city A smart city is a technologically modern urban area that uses different types of electronic methods and sensors to collect specific data. Information gained from that data is used to manage assets, resources and services efficiently; in retur ...

. Also called adaptive street lighting, it brightens when sensing activity and dims while not. This is different from traditional stationary illumination, and that which dims on a

timer A timer is a specialized type of clock used for measuring specific time intervals. Timers can be categorized into two main types. The word "timer" is usually reserved for devices that counts down from a specified time interval, while devices th ...

History

Europe

The first patent requests for intelligent street lighting stem from the late 1990s. But it wasn't until April 7, 2006, that Europe experienced the first large scale implementation of a control network in a street lighting application. The implementation took place in

Oslo Oslo ( , , or ; sma, Oslove) is the capital and most populous city of Norway. It constitutes both a county and a municipality. The municipality of Oslo had a population of in 2022, while the city's greater urban area had a population of ...

(Norway) and it was expected to reduce energy usage by 50 percent, improve roadway safety, and minimize maintenance costs. The Oslo project triggered interest from other cities in Europe, and formed the basis for other sustainability initiatives, such as the E-Street initiative. This research group focused on ways to reduce energy usage in outdoor lighting systems in the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are located primarily in Europe, Europe. The union has a total area of ...

(EU). The E-Street group strongly influenced EU standards and legislation for intelligent outdoor lighting systems.

Features

Street lights can be made intelligent by placing

camera A camera is an optical instrument that can capture an image. Most cameras can capture 2D images, with some more advanced models being able to capture 3D images. At a basic level, most cameras consist of sealed boxes (the camera body), with ...

s or other

sensors A sensor is a device that produces an output signal for the purpose of sensing a physical phenomenon. In the broadest definition, a sensor is a device, module, machine, or subsystem that detects events or changes in its environment and sends ...

on them, which enables them to detect movement (e.g. Sensity's Light Sensory Network, GE's "Currents", Tvilight's CitySense). Additional technology enables the street lights to communicate with one another. Different companies have different variations to this technology. When a passer-by is detected by a camera or sensor, it will communicate this to neighboring street lights, which will brighten so that people are always surrounded by a safe circle of light. The SmartLighting technology of the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences does this as well, and has been installed in Bernburg-Strenzfeld in Germany. Street lights illuminate at a longer distance ahead of the pedestrian than behind the pedestrian in the SmartLighting concept.

Control

Some companies also offer software with which the street lights can be monitored and managed wirelessly. Clients, or other companies, can access the software from a computer, or even a tablet. From this software, they can gather data, pre-set levels of brightness and dimming time; receive warning signals when a light defects.

Guidelines

The U.S. Federal Highway Administration has issued guidelines to provide a process by which a governmental agency or a lighting designer can select the required lighting level for a road or street and implement adaptive lighting for a lighting installation or lighting retrofit.Guidelines for the Implementation of Reduced Lighting on Roadways.
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References

{{Artificial light sources Types of lamp Street lighting Smart cities