An Economic Evaluation of an Intelligent Street Lighting System for Smart Cities Context and Applications

Conventional luminaires applied to the public lighting system cannot perform communication, control, and management features. Thus, intelligent lighting emerged way of providing management and control of the entire interconnected system, ensuring reliability, cost savings, and high efficiency. Therefore, this research work presents the development of an intelligent public lighting prototype based on a simple light controller. The system aims to improve this process by addressing some parameters, such as lighting power and saving light through a pedestrian presence sensor. The implementation of the public lighting system is based on LEDs because it provides low energy consumption. Besides, this research also provides an economic analysis of the proposed device to evaluate its applicability and possible benefits. The results proved the efficiency and flexibility of the proposed smart device. The use of the proposed prototype, along with the replacement of less efficient technologies by LED luminaires, generates an economic return that varies between 33.25 - 427.84 R$/year; leading to a return on investment of 24.16 % to 937.02 % at the end of the system’s useful life.