The Role of Adaptive Lighting in Street Lighting Applications

The advent of LEDs in street lighting applications and the corresponding technological evolution during the last decades has given the opportunity to societies to create a more sustainable lighting environment. However, in most cases, up to now, in upgrading the infrastructures of the national roads, the assessment of street lighting tenders is limited at meeting the lighting design criteria as proposed by European Norms such as luminance, uniformity, threshold increment and the edge of illuminance ratio. As the candidate companies achieve the lighting requirements, the next stage of the evaluation is the financial. None of the existing energy indexes, environmental criteria or the benefit of the adaptive lighting is examined. The aim of this study is to indicate the effect of adaptive lighting in luminaire selection in street lighting applications. The outcome shows that the dimming procedure can affect significantly the results of selection of the optimal luminaire in every street lighting case. The real function between the light output and the consumed power differs remarkably when luminaires are dimmed and the adaptive lighting is selected in curfew hours as until now this function is considered faulty as linear. This difference can change the evaluation procedure and the classification of the luminaires in a light tender.