Sustainable Street Lighting Design Supported by Hypergraph-Based Computational Model

• Main Author: Adam Sȩdziwy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2015-12-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: street lighting; energy efficiency; photometric computations; CO2 reduction
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/1/13

Street lighting systems are significant energy consumers in urban environments. The important step toward the reduction of this energy consumption and, thus, finding a balance between functional requirements and savings-related demands, was introducing LED-based light sources. There still exists, however, a margin for further savings, which is associated with well-tailored designs of road lighting installations. The critical impediment that has to be overcame beforehand is the computational complexity related to preparing such a well-suited design. To make this approach feasible, we propose using the formal graph-based model, enabling efficient heuristic computations. In this article, we demonstrate several real-life cases showing a coarse estimation of potential savings in terms of reduced CO2 emission. The presented results are expressed in kWh of saved energy, metric tones of CO2 , but also as a volume of combusted fuels, to make the assessment more tangible.