Group decision making based autonomous control system for street lighting

Most traditional street lighting systems do not have the function of autonomous control. Inspired by social animals and insects, an autonomous control system for street lighting is presented in this paper. All the lamp nodes compose a wireless sensor network (WSN) based lamp group in which there are a lamp leader, a succeeding leader, and some lamp members. All the lamp members communicate with the lamp leader by forming a tree topology. The lamp member collects ambient illumination using a light sensor periodically. When finding the illumination is under the preset threshold, the lamp member will send a turning-on vote to the lamp leader. The lamp leader counts the number of votes received from the members. When the number of the votes is larger than the preset threshold, the lamp leader will send a turning-on command to all the lamp members. Just like the succession behavior in social animals, the succeeding leader in the proposed system can automatically take the place of the current lamp leader when it is disabled. A failure message can be sent to the remote street lighting maintenance center by a GPRS network. Leader switching and group decision making tests have been carried out for validating these proposed methods. The experimental results show that the proposed system can automatically response to ambient light changes. The method of group decision making improves the anti-interference capability and the intelligence level of the lighting control system. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.