Smart City Dortmund | 36.000 Smart Street Lights

Customer Need

We were searching for an open and flexible light management system

“Decades-old public lighting infrastructure resulted in poor illumination with increasing operating and maintenance costs. Inadequate lighting conditions also compromised public and traffic safety. We wanted to address these issues in an efficient way. At the same time, we wanted Dortmund to be future-ready through smart connected infrastructure,” explained Mr. Meinolf Pflug from the Dortmund Civil Engineering Office.

“The cable infrastructure and the cabinet switching points are not owned by the city and therefore cannot be used for switching or controlling the street lights. Furthermore, many of the street lights are required to be powered 24 x 7h due to multiple infrastructural reasons,” adds Mr. Jan Wiesemann, Project Manager from lighting specialist Trilux.

Dortmund underwent intensive planning and tendering phase. It was naturally important to meet the lighting and road safety requirements. A significant reduction in costs and CO2 emissions were also expected. The City Council also expressed a strong desire to make public lighting infrastructure flexible and open for future use. Furthermore, the smart street lighting system should be able to interoperate with other smart infrastructure and be Smart City ready. “This extensive market exploration process formed the basis for the specifications of the new lighting systems in Dortmund,” concludes Mr. Pflug.

Smart Monitoring

Improved Safety

Right light at the right place at the right time clearly improves the safety perception of citizens.

Tvilight’s smart street lighting solution offers precise control over the street lights, enabling the city to provide adequate illumination that boosts both citizen safety and traffic safety.

Motion sensor-based light-on-demand system will be used at selected locations in the city to enhance the public’s need for safety.

Smart City Ready

Open standards and Open APIs-based solutions enable easy integration and interoperability between different systems. For instance, the LMS is being inter-connected to the local asset management system (SixData) through Open API to leverage monitoring and servicing effectiveness.

“Flexibility and interoperability of the system are important. The experts at Tvilight have therefore designed an open system to be able to develop further software functions,” explains Mr. Pflug.

“This system will soon be able to control citywide lamp switching through a couple of centralized ambient twilight sensors that accurately measure visible light levels in the city. Data from these sensors will be used by the LMS (through open API) to automatically switch street lights. Thereby benefiting from a uniform light switching as well as achieve a further energy saving of 5% – 10% when compared to local switching,” explains Ms. Heide Jeuken, Commercial and Operations Director at Tvilight.