There are a number or powerful reasons for managing lighting in a building:

• Commercial Environment – need to manage costs
• Increasing cost of energy
• Social Environment
• Corporate responsibility towards the environment
• Legislative Environment
• Kyoto protocol & local regulations Features of lighting management
• flexibility
• energy savings
• operational cost savings
• user control & choice
• interoperable

Flexibility

Traditional mains installation limits flexibility as any changes to switching arrangements involve disruptive alterations to the installation and mains wiring. An intelligent lighting management system enables all changes to switching arrangements to be achieved through head-end graphical software and without any wiring changes. The complete lighting installation is graphically managed and monitored through head-end software which shows:

• lighting status
• lamp failure
• lamp hours-run
• hardware status

Energy savings

Energy savings are achieved through -

• time-based control to switch lights off
• presence-related control of lighting
• daylight-linking of perimeter lighting
• small area local control
• dimming of lighting
• integration with other energy-consuming services

A recent dimming project in Singapore achieved 40% energy savings simply by varying lighting levels over the 12 hour occupation period. Additional energy savings could be achieved through presence detection and daylight-linking.

Operational savings

Operational savings are achieved through -

• real-time monitoring of the installation
• lamp-hours logging optimises relamping
• lamp-failure alerts for proactive maintenance
• monitoring & alarms via web or PDAs
• no disruption for switching layout changes

User control and choice

Individuals are empowered with control of their lighting environment and can switch lighting on/off and adjust levels to suit their preference or task.

Local control devices include:

• wall switches
• presence detectors & multisensors
• desktop controllers
• hand held transmitters
• telephone
• web browser

Interoperable

Systems using open protocols (eg. Lon) enable products from different manufacturers to share information and work together enhancing the efficiency of the building (eg. lighting and HVAC can both be linked to occupancy).

Open protocols avoid clients being reliant on individual manufacturers for support and maintenance as a person versed in the open protocol can handle many systems.