Energy-Efficient and Emergency Dispatch System for Smart Street Lighting

Abstract

Smart cities are going to be the need for the future generation. For any city to be smart, two major things to look at are its energy consumption and the safety of citizens. The aim of this work is to optimize energy consumption in public lighting and to make roads safer by ensuring quick dispatch of emergency services upon detection of an accident or any abnormal condition on the roads. Public lighting has a huge energy consumption. For public lighting energy optimization, the proposed system uses a microwave Doppler motion sensor interfaced with Arduino to detect vehicle movement and switch on corresponding lights to illuminate the road, hence saving a lot of energy against traditional street lights that are kept on for the entire duration of the night. A number of lives are lost annually in road accidents due to emergency services reaching a few minutes later than needed. To tackle this issue, the proposed system demonstrates a prototype model to detect an accident, or any abnormal condition such as a roadblock and inform the nearby authorities to take necessary action. The novelty of this system is that it is placed on roads rather than vehicles which makes it independent of vehicle type and is accessible and affordable to all.