Commercial Technologies for Advanced Light Control in Smart Building Energy Management Systems: A Comparative Study

This work investigates the economic, social, and environmental impact of adopting different smart lighting architectures for home automation in two geographical and regulatory regions: Algiers, Algeria, and Stuttgart, Germany. Lighting consumes a considerable amount of energy, and devices for smart lighting solutions are among the most purchased smart home devices. As commercialized solutions come with variant features, we empirically evaluate through this study the impact of each one of the energy-related features and provide insights on those that have higher energy saving contribution. The study started by investigating the state-of-the-art of commercialized ICT-based light control solutions, which allowed the extraction of the energy-related features. Based on the outcomes of this study, we generated simulation scenarios and selected evaluations metrics to evaluate the impact of dimming, daylight harvesting, scheduling, and motion detection. The simulation study has been conducted using EnergyPlussimulation tool, which enables fine-grained realistic evaluation. The results show that adopting smart lighting technologies have a payback period of few years and that the use of these technologies has positive economic and societal impacts, as well as on the environment by considerably reducing gas emissions. However, this positive contribution is highly sensitive to the geographical location, energy prices, and the occupancy profile.