1092 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 13, NO. 3, MARCH 2013
Distributed Illumination Control With Local Sensing
and Actuation in Networked Lighting Systems
David Caicedo and Ashish Pandharipande, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract— We consider the problem of illumination control in a
networked lighting system wherein luminaires have local sensing
and actuation capabilities. Each luminaire: 1) consists of a light-
emitting diode (LED) based light source dimmable by a local
controller; 2) is actuated based on sensing information from a
presence sensor, that determines occupant presence, and a light
sensor, that measures illuminance, within their respective fields
of view; and 3) a communication module to exchange control
information within a local neighborhood. We consider distributed
illumination control in such an intelligent lighting system to
achieve presence-adaptive and daylight-integrated spatial illumi-
nation rendering. The rendering is specified as target values at the
light sensors, and under these constraints, a local controller has
to determine the optimum dimming levels of its associated LED
luminaire so that the power consumed in rendering is minimized.
The formulated optimization problem is a distributed linear
programming problem with constraints on exchanging control
information within a neighborhood. A distributed optimization
algorithm is presented to solve this problem and its stability
and convergence are studied. Sufficient conditions, in terms of
parameter selection, under which the algorithm can achieve a
feasible solution are provided. The performance of the algorithm
is evaluated in an indoor office setting in terms of achieved
illuminance rendering and power savings.
Index Terms— Daylight and occupancy adaptive lighting,
distributed lighting systems, distributed sensing and light
actuation, lighting control.
I. I NTRODUCTION
A
DVANCES in semiconductors have brought in a new
generation of light sources in the form of light emitting
diodes (LEDs). Minitiarization and rapid cost-downs from
semiconductorization has also made it possible for greater inte-
gration of sensing, communication, computation and control
functions into luminaires. This has made intelligent LED lumi-
naires feasible, that (i) are dimmable by an associated local
controller, (ii) can be actuated based on local sensing inputs
such as presence detection and light intensity measurement
within the sensor field of view, and (iii) can exchange control
information within a local neighborhood using a communica-
tion module. We address the problem of illumination control
in a system of such intelligent luminaires to achieve energy-
efficient illumination rendering over the workspace.
Manuscript received September 28, 2012; revised November 10, 2012;
accepted November 10, 2012. Date of publication November 21, 2012; date of
current version February 4, 2013. The associate editor coordinating the review
of this paper and approving it for publication was Prof. Aime Lay-Ekuakille.
The authors are with Philips Research, Eindhoven 5656AE, The Netherlands
(e-mail: david.caicedo@philips.com; ashish.p@philips.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSEN.2012.2228850
We consider illumination control for indoor office general
lighting applications. Office lighting is one of the major
constituents of electrical energy consumption in buildings [1].
As such, energy-efficient strategies for illumination rendering
in lighting systems are of interest. We consider presence-
adaptive, daylight-integrated illumination rendering in this
paper. In particular, we want to achieve uniform illumination
at an average illuminance of L
o
WP
in an occupied zone and
a lower average illuminance of L
u
WP
otherwise over the
workspace plane. Local occupancy in a zone is determined by
a presence sensor. In office lighting, the illumination distribu-
tion achieved at the workspace plane, typically corresponding
to desk level, is of most interest. This is a horizontal plane at
a certain vertical height from the ceiling plane, in which the
luminaires are located. Illuminance is however measured in
practice using light sensors placed in the ceiling. As such, light
measurement is in a plane different from the one where the
spatial illumination rendering is desired. Also, a light sensor
measures a spatial average of the light distribution in its field of
view. A light sensor calibration step is thus employed to obtain
target sensor values. These target light sensor illuminance
values then specify the rendering constraints to be satisfied
under distributed control. The specifics of the lighting system
are described in Section II.
For a given realization of occupancy and daylight dis-
tribution in the office space, the local controller needs to
determine the dimming level of its associated luminaire using
local presence and light sensor measurements and commu-
nication with controllers in its neighborhood. This problem
is mathematically a distributed linear programming problem
with constraints on information exchange, and is formulated in
Section III. We present a distributed optimization algorithm to
obtain a suboptimum solution to this problem, and is described
in Section IV. A bound is further obtained on the deviation
of the resulting power consumption from that obtained under
optimum dimming. In Section V, we analyze stability and
convergence of the proposed algorithm. Sufficient conditions
are provided for specifying the neighborhood for exchanging
control information such that the algorithm can achieve the
target sensor values, i.e. a feasible solution is obtained.
We evaluate the performance of the distributed illumination
control algorithm with an example open office lighting sim-
ulation. The performance is evaluated based on the achieved
illumination rendering and power savings. A comparison is
made with an optimum centralized control algorithm. These
numerical results are presented in Section VI.
Different lighting control approaches exist in literature
[2]–[12], depending on the system architecture, connectivity
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