An intelligent lighting control system for individual visual comfort and energy savings in buildings

Office buildings especially workplaces are not tailor-made to meet personal indoor requirements of comfort. Therefore, it is a challenge to meet individual-level comfort in these buildings without compromising energy-efficiency. This paper presents and analyses an intelligent lighting system for the visual comfort of individuals and the energy efficiency of buildings. The proposed lighting system best uses historical user preferences, collaborative user preferences, and historical energy consumption data through a recommender systems-based intelligent algorithm to generate proffered lighting set-point and optimize energy consumption of the lighting system. The system is a wireless sensor-actuator network (WSAN)-based and makes use of illumination sensors and occupancy sensors, which measure the ambient light, detect the user’s presence, and controls the intensity of light on a user’s work area. The Smart Android App allows the user to modify light intensities depending on visual comfort or the activity-based needs of users. Results from the testbed show that the proposed lighting system is around 72% energy-efficient than the conventional fluorescent lighting system while providing individual visual comfort to the occupants. This energy efficiency is achieved through the combined effects of using energy-efficient LED lighting system and automatic as well as manual lighting control through intelligent algorithm and smart App respectively used in the system.