On Scalable, Event-Oriented Control for Lighting Systems

This paper proposes a scalable, multi-agent architecture for control of modern outdoor lighting systems. Most contemporary lighting systems utilize a static control structure, which is based on simple criteria (e. g. date, time of day, weather forecast) and operate on few (two or three) lighting modes of luminaries. Thus, centralized management is sufficient for such systems. Modern lighting control systems take dynamic and fine-grained (often local) conditions into account and operate on more sophisticated equipment, characterized by flexible lighting levels and geometries. These factors cause scalability problems, which may render the system unable to react to incoming events in time. The proposed solution introduces a hierarchy of agents, which allow for distributed control and supervision. Moreover a graph-based model is introduced as a formal representation of the agent's knowledge, which allows it to be processed in parallel by distributed agents.