Modeling Urban Street Lighting Infrastructure Using Open Source Data Sets

Streetlights in urban settings have been increasingly ubiquitous assets in cities worldwide. The illumination of street networks accounts for a major and growing burden on the environment, municipalities's budgets and power supply systems. The global demand for street lighting is expected to increase by 80% by 2030 compared to 2005. This paper introduces an open source GIS-based tool to simulate urban street infrastructures and calculate the electricity demand for streetlights. Furthermore, different scenarios of operating street lighting systems using local available renewable energy resources and flexibilization technologies are investigated. Using solely open source data sets, this research confirms the possibility of replicating realistic urban street infrastructures. The extracted OpenStreetMap geospatial road networks for the case study of the city of Berlin is validated against available public data sets. It is found that, a self sufficient streetlight system, 100% renewables, for the investigated case study requires significant investments in renewables and storage technologies. The developed tool, called FlexiGIS-light, establishes a strong basis for further analysis and discussion for the planning of sustainable and integrated street lighting systems in urban areas.