Towards cyber-physical approach for prototyping indoor lighting automation systems

During daily operations of a building, a significant amount of energy is spent on indoor illumination. The choice of different lighting sources and control strategies can notably affect the energy consumption. To achieve the most economical lighting design, a number of factors from both physical and cyber perspectives must be considered. More importantly, these factors must be taken into account during early design phrases of building architecture and automation systems. This paper proposes an infrastructure towards the cyber-physical approach for prototyping indoor illumination. In particular, the distributed lighting automation system is modeled using the IEC 61499 standard. The lighting energy performance of a building is evaluated according to the EN 15193 standard. By integrating the evaluation methodology of energy efficiency in the development of lighting automation systems, adequate indications regarding the correlation between physical and cyber designs can be revealed. The proposed design approach has been demonstrated on a case study house, where impacts of different lighting control strategies on the house's energy efficiency can be quantitatively compared.