An intelligent system for energy-efficient lighting and illuminance control in buildings

Visual comfort and energy saving are two main aspects of an intelligent lighting system. Although the modern lighting systems have been able to achieve major energy savings through different lighting control strategies, the users’ visual preferences have been generally neglected in these systems. Human perception has always been an important factor affecting the overall performance of a lighting system. Not much of the studies carried out in this field have focused on delivering the desired illuminance to the users. Not to mention that frequent changes or noticeable jumps in the output light levels could also be very annoying for the users. The contribution of this thesis is twofold: First, a robust communication framework was developed which is a major pre-requisite for deployment of any lighting system. The developed framework is responsible for facilitating the communication between various types of hardware such as motion, and light sensors, as well as light actuators in the network. Secondly, daylight harvesting, motion detection, and light level tuning strategies were explored by utilizing the developed lighting system infrastructure. In particular, a lighting control algorithm was proposed for residential and commercial use, which when integrated with a building automation system, can satisfy the visual preferences of the users while reducing the overall amount of energy usage in the system. In open-plan environments, the proposed algorithm is capable of delivering the desired light levels for each occupant. The effectiveness of the developed lighting system and the proposed control algorithm were verified by a proof-of-concept testbed and pilot implementations.