Model calibration methodology to assess the actual lighting conditions of a road infrastructure

Abstract

Street lighting plays an important role in the comfort and safety of drivers and pedestrians, so the control and management of the lighting systems operation and consumption is an essential service for a city. In this document, a methodology is presented to calibrate lighting models in order to assess the lighting performance through simulation techniques. The objective of this calibration is to identify the maintenance factor of the street lamps, determine the real average luminance coefficient of the road pavement and adapt the reflection properties of the road material. The method is applied in three stages and is based on the use of Radiance and GenOpt software suits for the modeling, simulation, and calibration of lighting scenes. The proposed methodology achieves errors as low as 13% for the calculation of illuminance and luminance, evincing its potential to assess the actual lighting conditions of a road.