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Open Architectures for Intelligent Solid State Lighting Systems

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - OpenAIS (Open Architectures for Intelligent Solid State Lighting Systems)

Reporting period: 2017-01-01 to 2018-06-30

The lighting industry is currently going through a radical transformation, driven by both the rapid progress of Solid State Lighting (SSL) and the changing societal needs like sustainability, improved energy efficiency and CO2 reduction. At the same time, Internet technology is developing fast and is approaching the point where it becomes economically feasible to connect each luminaire to the Internet. Because SSL-based light sources can be unlimitedly controlled (switching and dimming) and because LED drivers operate at similar voltages as IT devices, this is an excellent match. OpenAIS aims at developing the dominant design for Internet connected lighting systems with open interfaces of all electronic components. Connecting all light points in a building to the Internet will enable a large variety of new services related to comfort and well-being for the people in the building, more efficient use of the building and energy saving. As luminaires are everywhere in the building where people are, the luminaires provide an excellent infrastructure for a large variety of devices.

The objectives of OpenAIS are:
• To prepare the EU lighting industry to successfully supply products for 2020’s offices, and maintain its leading position when lighting in buildings become Internet of Things connected.
• To define an optimized and well thought-through open system architecture, based on IP to the luminaires, and have it accepted by the European lighting industry.
• To standardize this system architecture, either during the project, or after the project.
• To put the European lighting industry within a renewed value space of components, services and applications in office lighting based on this architecture and exploiting the Internet of Things.
• Contribute to Europe’s energy reduction goals by combining the full power of IoT technology, LED technology and Smart Grid into a dominant lighting technology.

The project is driven by a strong consortium of leading lighting companies in Europe (Zumtobel, Tridonic and Philips) and major players in IoT technology (ARM, NXP and Dynniq). Consortium partner Johnson Controls brings in expertise on efficient building management and knowledge on the needs of the users. In addition TU/e and TNO-ESI are in the consortium as prominent academic institutes.
OpenAIS researched user expectations, derived requirements and use cases and created a fully CoAP / IoT based lighting controls and communication architecture seamlessly working on all physical internet media. The architecture closes the identified gaps between the existing IoT frameworks and the domain specific requirements from the lighting industry. The architecture has been verified by a full-scale office lighting system, including presence, daylight and user control at a real office space, also including smartphone control through user Apps and an Integration in a standard BMS- System. The most critical new architecture solution that OpenAIS designed and introduced to cover the requirements for professional indoor lighting, namely out-of-the-box operation, low latency secure large group control, local control resilience and peak bandwith control in multi-PHY IPv6 based systems, have been proven to work sufficiently well.

The stakeholder and user research identified three main success elements for IP based lighting controls: “Easy life”, “increased building value” and “building wide ecosystem”. All three include life-cycle aspects that need technological and communication flexibility that allow the adaptation of the system over the deployment lifecycle.

A key innovation of the OpenAIS Architecture achievement is the low latency group communication OGC (OpenAIS Group Communication), that allows to deliver lighting commands to many controlled light points in parallel. In addition to resolving the latency and scalability issues, OGC provides the base for an elaborated out-of-the-box operation that supports the electrical contractor best, and induces operational compatibility across different IoT frameworks and their (future) versions.

For the application layer of the OpenAIS project a dedicated Object Model was developed, as investigations showed that public models were much too limited for advanced high quality lighting control and simple integration into BMS’s

The architecture showed its great potential by serving a full featured full-scale office lighting control system (400 luminaires with embedded sensors). It was validated and demonstrated in a real-life pilot in an industrial heritage buiding, the “White Lady” building in Eindhoven. Despite the many technical challenges encountered in the realization phase, OpenAIS succeeded in deploying a fully operational multi-vendor lighting control system based, on IoT-standards and frameworks, with IP connection to the end node. This system combined wired and wireless devices from multiple vendors in a single system connected through a standard IT-network with commercial off-the-shelve IT components. The openness of the system was validated by the integration of several additional components, commissioning tooling and user applications, by parties outside the main lighting manufacturers from the consortium, that seamlessly worked together.

Final Research on user satisfaction showed positive reaction of involved users. However, some technical attention points for future product development and system designs remain, especially the standby energy of the IT equipment (PoE switches, routers etc.) and the IP interfaces of the nodes will need some more progress before the energy data of sophisticated heritage systems can be matched.

OpenAIS standardized OGC and the Object Model by transferr to the resp. Fairhair and OMA/IPSO SDO's opening the route to a complete ecosystem of lighting controls.

31 contributions to industry conferences, 10 to scientific conferences and 10 publications in journals and magazines were made.
In the economic perspective, the open interface standard of OpenAIS strengthens European leadership in the market and catalyses market acceptance of connected building systems. Introducing connected lighting will increase building value and the open standard will be an enabler for competition and third party application development.

From the service perspective, data (analytics) are expected to play an important role in de-siloing the separate building systems. Sharing this data with stakeholders outside the building can make the lighting system even more valuable, but it is important to note that the applications from third party developers make the collected data valuable. Market research studies predict that IoT based intelligent energy management systems can reduce energy use in Offices by 20%, producing a potential economic impact from $11 billion to $20 billion per year in 2025.

Finally the market take up of human-centric lighting in the future can be accelerated. OpenAIS can add value by providing comfort, productivity and increasing wellbeing of many building occupants. Market research studies estimate that typical process and productivity improvements for workers enabled by IoT can yield gains of 10-30%, with a potential impact of $30 billion to $80 billion per year in 2025.