Sustainable street lighting design supported by hypergraph-based computational model

Abstract

Street lighting systems are significant energy consumers in urban environments. The important step toward the reduction of this energy consumption and, thus, finding a balance between functional requirements and savings-related demands, was introducing LED-based light sources. There still exists, however, a margin for further savings, which is associated with well-tailored designs of road lighting installations. The critical impediment that has to be overcame beforehand is the computational complexity related to preparing such a well-suited design. To make this approach feasible, we propose using the formal graph-based model, enabling efficient heuristic computations. In this article, we demonstrate several real-life cases showing a coarse estimation of potential savings in terms of reduced CO2 emission. The presented results are expressed in kWh of saved energy, metric tones of CO2, but also as a volume of combusted fuels, to make the assessment more tangible.