WinLight: A WiFi-based occupancy-driven lighting control system for smart building

Artificial lighting accounts for a significant proportion (19%) of energy consumption in building environments. This large contribution calls for the creation of energy-efficient lighting control schemes. In this article, we present WinLight, a novel occupancy-driven lighting control system that aims to reduce energy consumption while simultaneously preserving the lighting comfort of occupants. By leveraging the fine-grained occupancy information estimated by existing WiFi infrastructure in a non-intrusive manner, WinLight computes an appropriate dimming command for each lamp based on a novel lighting control algorithm. A centralized lighting control system assigns these commands to a zonal gateway, and occupancy-driven lighting control is achieved by actuating the brightness adjustment with a local controller integrated within each lamp. Moreover, a WinLight App is designed to enable occupants to customize their luminance preferences and to control nearby lamps using their mobile devices. We implemented WinLight in a 1500 m2 multi-functional office in Singapore and conducted an experiment during 24 weeks. The experimental results demonstrate that WinLight achieves 93.09% and 80.27% energy savings compared to static scheduling lighting control scheme and PIR sensor based lighting control scheme while guaranteeing the personalized lighting comfort of each occupant. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.