Commercial lighting is a concept relative to household lighting. Places are generally public places, such as office buildings, hotels, supermarkets, shopping malls, schools, parking garages, museums, etc. The main body of procurement is generally institutions rather than individuals, and installations are generally carried out by engineering construction. . The goals to be achieved by commercial lighting often depend on the application, such as contrast, color temperature requirements, and energy-saving requirements. With the application of Internet of Things technology, smart systems have given commercial lighting a dynamic, variable, and specific program to interact with users, and can achieve energy-saving effects, playing an increasingly important role in commercial lighting. .

The development of smart commercial lighting landed earlier and developed faster than the domestic field. According to statistics and estimates of relevant agencies, the global smart lighting market scale in 2017 was 4.6 billion US dollars, of which smart commercial lighting accounted for about 60%. It will grow steadily in the next few years. By 2020, the global smart lighting market will reach 13.4 billion US dollars. For smart outdoor, home and public lighting, smart commercial lighting still has the highest share, accounting for more than half.

Application scenarios of smart systems

In commercial lighting, there is a need for intelligent control in some occasions, which is also a prerequisite for the implementation of intelligent systems. At present, the application of smart systems in commercial lighting is mainly energy saving, scene control and centralized monitoring.

In energy-saving occasions, the commonly used control methods are timetable control, human sensor control and illuminance control. For example, warehouse lighting. In a warehouse with tens of thousands of square meters, shelves are arranged in sequence. The traditional way is that the lights are always on, and the delivery personnel or forklifts enter and exit from the aisle. There are people, and many aisles are empty most of the time, so there is no need to keep all the lights on. The result of this is that electricity bills are very expensive. For a warehouse-operated company and warehouses across the country, the electricity bill for a year is a very huge expense. The same occasions include underground parking lots, office buildings, etc. A common feature of these occasions is that people are not always there, and there is no need for lights to be there all the time.

The smart system provides a solution to perceive the presence of people, so as to turn on the lights when needed, such as sensing the presence of people or forklifts in a warehouse, turning on the lights in the corresponding aisle, and turning off the lights in other areas where no people are moving; The underground garage senses people and vehicles and turns on the lighting in the corresponding area. In the field of office buildings, in addition to detecting the presence of people, timetable control can also be added to save energy. For example, the energy-saving application case of Murata Tokyo office building wireless system in Figure 1 uses human body detection and timetable control to achieve energy saving. Compared with the previous control system, energy consumption has been reduced by 63%. Such a smart system not only improves the economic efficiency of enterprises, but also meets the global goal of controlling greenhouse gases and protecting the environment.

In the occasion of scene control, such as a banquet hall is a very typical application. The banquet halls of large hotels are also called multi-function halls. Various events are held, such as industry forum meetings, product launches, corporate training, birthday banquets, wedding banquets, etc. Each event has different requirements for lighting effects. , In the same activity, different stages also have different requirements for lighting. For example, for product launches, there are different requirements for lighting during the guest admission phase, product presentation phase, and intermission phase. There are similar scenarios in the meeting room, such as setting up a meeting discussion mode, PPT presentation mode, intermission mode, and leave mode.

The scene control brings the light to dynamically adapt to the current theme activity, and achieve good activity effects. In the case of centralized monitoring, mainly in some large public places, such as office buildings, public areas of large shopping malls, etc., the lighting is controlled on the main control platform to save manpower and time; at the same time, the status of the lighting work is monitored, such as watching Whether any lamp is working abnormally, the system actively reports it in time. The relevant management staff can receive the information and send someone to repair it immediately if there is a problem. The centralized management of lighting brings time-saving, labor-saving and high-efficiency.

Smart system technology and solutions

How does the current smart system achieve the above functions, mainly through connection technology, perception technology, and front-end and back-end software. In addition, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence are increasingly being combined with smart lighting. At present, the trend in household lighting is relatively obvious. I believe that in the future, we will find more in commercial lighting based on project applications. Fit point.

Since it is a smart system, connection is the first step and the most basic step. Connecting all the lamps and lanterns can communicate, on this basis, intelligent means can be applied to dimming, coloring, monitoring energy consumption and checking the status of lamps and lanterns. Wait. There are mainly wired and wireless connection technologies, and most of the current market applications are wired connections. Wired technology includes various bus standards, such as RS485, DALI, BACNet, KNX, etc.; wireless connections mainly include ZigBee, BLE mesh, EnOcean, and proprietary radio frequency protocols. The advantage of wired communication over wireless is that it is stable and the signal is not easily interfered. However, it is troublesome to install, especially in the after-installation and transformation market, which requires construction and wiring. If the space is relatively large, the amount of construction is also a huge expense. The advantage of wireless is that it is convenient to install. It has a huge advantage in the after-installation and renovation market. It is more obvious in developed countries such as Europe and the United States. Labor costs will be considered when doing construction. Labor costs account for a relatively high total project cost, including post-maintenance. Replacement and so on, so at this level, wireless is a relatively large value. As shown in Figure 2, there are many current wireless technologies, and they can simply be distinguished according to transmission distance and transmission rate.

At present, the wireless in the field of smart street lights generally uses low-power wide area network technologies, such as NB-IOT, etc. So what characteristics should the wireless technology suitable for commercial lighting have? According to actual application conditions, it is generally believed that there should be the following characteristics: large-scale networking, convenient networking, low power consumption, stable and reliable network, strong anti-interference, long transmission distance, low latency, high security, standardization, etc.

Since it is a commercial project, the industry is generally more cautious in choosing it, mainly from the consideration of stability and reliability, system performance, cost and ease of construction. Wireless has its advantages in installation convenience and cost, but it has not yet occupied the mainstream of the current market. The main concern is its reliability and stability under large networks. Some large international companies and enterprises with unique technologies have deepened their efforts in this field. A lot of effort. For example, the wireless commercial smart lighting system developed by Murata uses the method of optimizing the mesh network and adopts a specific mechanism to prevent co-frequency interference. In a commercial lighting environment with a large number of nodes, it can realize large-scale lamp networking and maintain the network. The reliability and stability. It is used in more and more large-scale office buildings, museums and other occasions in the global market.

Based on connection, the control methods of the smart system include perception technology, front-end and back-end software, etc. The most commonly used sensing technologies are passive infrared (PIR) sensors, illuminance sensors, and ultrasonic sensors. The PIR sensor can detect the movement of people, realize that the lights are on when people come, and the lights are off when people go. It is more suitable to be used in the warehouses and garages mentioned above. Some scenes can be used with the application of ultrasonic sensors to detect the presence of people. The illuminance sensor detects the current light intensity. For example, in the daytime where the building is near the window, the natural light is relatively strong, and the brightness of the lamp can be adjusted through the illuminance sensor to achieve constant illuminance applications, thereby saving energy consumption. The back-end software can implement some specific logic in the back-end server, such as the logic of automatic timing switch, which controls the switch and brightness of lights in different areas at different times of the office, working hours, lunch breaks, and off-duty hours. The background software can also count the overall energy consumption according to the recorded energy consumption of the lamps; it can also count the corresponding functions according to the monitored variables in other systems, and create the value of the data. The foreground software generally implements human-computer interaction, such as scene control, single light control, status display, etc.