Municipalities need to develop sustainable solutions to optimize energy consumption. Thus, public lighting is a key issue to reach the goal and become more sustainable according to SDG. Snap4City open source solution for smart light management is innovative, economically sustainable and technologically reliable. Public administrations may exploit the solution in easy manner, adopting open technology to avoid vendor lock in and proprietary technologies.
To this end, the Merano Municipal Services Company (ASM Merano) with the support of SNAP4, exploited the Snap4City platform to implement a smart light management system for the monitoring and control of public lighting, addressing hundreds and thousands of controlled luminaries. The solution has been deployed on a public cloud, exploiting the existing LoRaWAN network of Merano, and connecting DALI 2 nodes, FlashNet and not limited to them, that communicate through Lorawan gateways connected to an open-source network server based on Chirpstack (https://www.chirpstack.io/). Snap4City is used for the: dimering profile programming and management of smart light system (unicast and multicast), monitoring status and error management, also including the monitoring of cabinets powering luminaries. Moreover, the smart light management also implemented the adaptive lighting system based on traffic conditions (TAI, Traffic Adaptive Installation)
TAI is one of the latest innovations in public smart light management for sustainability. It allows to automatically adjust the illumination on the street on the basis of traffic conditions. Snap4City, based on traffic monitoring data from some measurement points, allows the management of TAI remotely in a simple and flexible way based on the standard defined in UNI11248:2016 by sending the relevant commands for lighting regulation to the affected luminaries in multicast modality. This integrated technology offers numerous advantages for administrations and citizens, including energy savings, reduction of and emissions, and improved road safety.
Thanks to Snap4City dashboards and panels, the operator can monitor and manage all the luminaries and network areas and the quality of services. Snap4City dashboards simplifies the service management modalities including profiles and TAI modalities for the different zones in the areas.
In particular, the dashboards are providing:
- The map of the whole city area involved with custom dynamic pins geographically positioned in the map and representing the luminaries and cabinets, changing their status in real time according to the data received. This allows to provide to stakeholders an immediate overview of the status of the implemented infrastructure;
- Real time trend of the ingested data allows to monitor the streetlights and cabinets data over time;
- The user interface to add new nodes in the multicast group, manage and set the different configuration and dimming profiles off all nodes connected in the network, by managing in the backend all the process logic to decode/code the proprietary protocol messages and commands.
- Programme and manage the TAI (Traffic Adaptive Installation) enabling an integrated and sustainable smart adaptive lighting solution. The dashboard provides an interface for programming the time-controlled variations of luminance level in relation to hourly traffic flow, weather conditions or other parameters.
The implemented solution based on Snap4City, demonstrated the potentiality for an integrated solution that can manage smart city operations in a more flexible manner, helping the municipality and stakeholder to take better decisions. Merano and SNAP4 offered a practical solution to help the city speed up its smart city development and address future challenges.
