ITERL: A Wireless Adaptive System for Efficient Road Lighting

This work presents the development and construction of an adaptive street lighting system that improves safety at intersections, which is the result of applying low-power Internet of Things (IoT) techniques to intelligent transportation systems. A set of wireless sensor nodes using the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.4 standard with additional internet protocol (IP) connectivity measures both ambient conditions and vehicle transit. These measurements are sent to a coordinator node that collects and passes them to a local controller, which then makes decisions leading to the streetlight being turned on and its illumination level controlled. Streetlights are autonomous, powered by photovoltaic energy, and wirelessly connected, achieving a high degree of energy efficiency. Relevant data are also sent to the highway conservation center, allowing it to maintain up-to-date information for the system, enabling preventive maintenance.Consejería de Fomento y Vivienda Junta de Andalucía G-GI3002 / IDIOFondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional G-GI3002 / IDI

Envisioning the future of public lighting through upcoming technologies by citizen-centered design

Outdoor lighting forms an essential component of public infrastructure in global urban context. The functions of street lighting have been the same for a long time. Currently, adaptive lighting is used within intelligent lighting systems that are tested for wide deployment. Adaptive lighting is a sensor-based system that uses LED technology to dim and brighten lighting on the streets depending on its context and movement on the streets. The benefits of the technology include, for example, the reduction of energy consumption, light pollution and disturbance of circadian rhythms of animals and plants. This new technology and its deployment have its concerns. Testing the impact of such a public lighting within the major cities in multiple contexts is complex. While urban technologies affect the everyday lives of people, involving them in shaping such a future public infrastructure and widening its application through participation is far from simple. Within the scope of my research, I wish to address enabling citizens’ participation in the visioning of future technologies that may have an impact on public lighting. Therefore, I chose to frame adaptive lighting of smart cities in the context of three future technologies, of autonomous cars, Li-Fi and battery storage. Autonomous cars could change the way we see the role of the public lighting of roads. With Li-Fi, cars could communicate with street lights accessing sensor data from the environment. Household batteries could be connected to street lighting grid and cities could rent storage or buy energy produced by private infrastructure. With these upcoming technologies, changes in the role of outdoor public lighting can be anticipated. I wish to highlight this reflexive relation between changing urban technologies and present a potential for citizen participation in shaping their urban environments. By using design procedures, I engaged with city officials and citizens in creating future urban visions for adaptive lighting and its interaction with three future technologies.Katuvalaistus muodostaa tärkeän osan julkista infrastruktuuria maailmanlaajuisesti. Katuvalot ovat pitkään pysyneet samankaltaisina toiminnoiltaan. Mukautuva valaistus on nykyään laajamittaisesti testattu ja käytetty teknologia älykkäissä valaistusjärjestelmissä, joka on sensoreja käyttävä teknologia, jossa LED valoja himmennetään ja kirkastetaan kadulla tapahtuvan liikenteen tai kontekstin mukaan. Teknologian hyötyjä ovat muun muassa energian kulutuksen ja valosaasteen vähentäminen ja pienemmät vaikutukset eläinten ja kasvien vuorokausirytmeihin. Tällä uudella teknologialla ja sen käyttöönotolla on myös haasteensa. Teknologian vaikutuksien testaaminen suurissa kaupungeissa eri konteksteissaan on monimutkaista, vaikka urbaanit teknologiat tulevat vaikuttamaan suoraan ihmisten päivittäiseen elämään. Pyrin mahdollistamaan asukkaiden osallistamisen tulevaisuuden katuvalaistuksen visioinnissa. Myös muilla tulevaisuuden teknologioilla on vaikutusta tulevaisuuden katuvalaistukseen. Tutkimuksen laajuuden rajoissa otettiin huomioon kolme muuta tulevaisuuden teknologiaa. Tutkin tulevaisuuden älykästä katuvalaistusta itseohjautuvien autojen, valoa käyttävän kommunikaatioteknologian Li-Fi:n ja energia varastojen kontekstissa. Itseohjautuvat autot voivat muuttaa käsitystä siitä, miten näemme valaistuksen roolin teillä. Autot voisivat kommunikoida toistensa kanssa Li-Fi:n avulla saaden sensoreiden tuottamaa dataa ympäristöstään. Kotitalouksien akut voisivat olla yhdistettynä katuvalaistusverkkoon ja kaupungit voisivat vuokrata varastoja tai ostaa energiaa, joka on tuotettu yksityisesti. Näiden tulevaisuuden teknologioiden avulla voidaan ennakoida katuvalaistuksen roolin muutosta. Pyrin korostamaan tätä heijastavaa suhdetta muuttuvien urbaanien teknologioiden välillä ja esittämään potentiaalin asukkaiden osallistamisessa kaupunkiympäristöä muodostaessa. Osallistin kaupungin toimihenkilöitä käyttäen muotoilumenetelmiä luoden tulevaisuuden visioita älykkäästä valaistuksesta ja tämän vuorovaikutuksesta kolmen tulevaisuuden teknologian välillä. Katuvalaistuksen toimintojen visiointiin käytettiin asukkaiden kanssa osallistavia muotoilumenetelmiä

Smart streetlights: a feasibility study

The world's cities are growing. The effects of population growth and urbanisation mean that more people are living in cities than ever before, a trend set to continue. This urbanisation poses problems for the future. With a growing population comes more strain on local resources, increased traffic and congestion, and environmental decline, including more pollution, loss of green spaces, and the formation of urban heat islands. Thankfully, many of these stressors can be alleviated with better management and procedures, particularly in the context of road infrastructure. For example, with better traffic data, signalling can be smoothed to reduce congestion, parking can be made easier, and streetlights can be dimmed in real time to match real-world road usage. However, obtaining this information on a citywide scale is prohibitively expensive due to the high costs of labour and materials associated with installing sensor hardware. This study investigated the viability of a streetlight-integrated sensor system to affordably obtain traffic and environmental information. This investigation was conducted in two stages: 1) the development of a hardware prototype, and 2) evaluation of an evolved prototype system. In Stage 1 of the study, the development of the prototype sensor system was conducted over three design iterations. These iterations involved, in iteration 1, the live deployment of the prototype system in an urban setting to select and evaluate sensors for environmental monitoring, and in iterations 2 and 3, deployments on roads with live and controlled traffic to develop and test sensors for remote traffic detection. In the final iteration, which involved controlled passes of over 600 vehicle, 600 pedestrian, and 400 cyclist passes, the developed system that comprised passive-infrared motion detectors, lidar, and thermal sensors, could detect and count traffic from a streetlight-integrated configuration with 99%, 84%, and 70% accuracy, respectively. With the finalised sensor system design, Stage 1 showed that traffic and environmental sensing from a streetlight-integrated configuration was feasible and effective using on-board processing with commercially available and inexpensive components. In Stage 2, financial and social assessments of the developed sensor system were conducted to evaluate its viability and value in a community. An evaluation tool for simulating streetlight installations was created to measure the effects of implementing the smart streetlight system. The evaluation showed that the on-demand traffic-adaptive dimming enabled by the smart streetlight system was able to reduce the electrical and maintenance costs of lighting installations. As a result, a 'smart' LED streetlight system was shown to outperform conventional always-on streetlight configurations in terms of financial value within a period of five to 12 years, depending on the installation's local traffic characteristics. A survey regarding the public acceptance of smart streetlight systems was also conducted and assessed the factors that influenced support of its applications. In particular, the Australia-wide survey investigated applications around road traffic improvement, streetlight dimming, and walkability, and quantified participants' support through willingness-to-pay assessments to enable each application. Community support of smart road applications was generally found to be positive and welcomed, especially in areas with a high dependence on personal road transport, and from participants adversely affected by spill light in their homes. Overall, the findings of this study indicate that our cities, and roads in particular, can and should be made smarter. The technology currently exists and is becoming more affordable to allow communities of all sizes to implement smart streetlight systems for the betterment of city services, resource management, and civilian health and wellbeing. The sooner that these technologies are embraced, the sooner they can be adapted to the specific needs of the community and environment for a more sustainable and innovative future

Development of artificial neural network-based object detection algorithms for low-cost hardware devices

Finally, the fourth work was published in the “WCCI” conference in 2020 and consisted of an individuals' position estimation algorithm based on a novel neural network model for environments with forbidden regions, named “Forbidden Regions Growing Neural Gas”.The human brain is the most complex, powerful and versatile learning machine ever known. Consequently, many scientists of various disciplines are fascinated by its structures and information processing methods. Due to the quality and quantity of the information extracted from the sense of sight, image is one of the main information channels used by humans. However, the massive amount of video footage generated nowadays makes it difficult to process those data fast enough manually. Thus, computer vision systems represent a fundamental tool in the extraction of information from digital images, as well as a major challenge for scientists and engineers. This thesis' primary objective is automatic foreground object detection and classification through digital image analysis, using artificial neural network-based techniques, specifically designed and optimised to be deployed in low-cost hardware devices. This objective will be complemented by developing individuals' movement estimation methods by using unsupervised learning and artificial neural network-based models. The cited objectives have been addressed through a research work illustrated in four publications supporting this thesis. The first one was published in the “ICAE” journal in 2018 and consists of a neural network-based movement detection system for Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras deployed in a Raspberry Pi board. The second one was published in the “WCCI” conference in 2018 and consists of a deep learning-based automatic video surveillance system for PTZ cameras deployed in low-cost hardware. The third one was published in the “ICAE” journal in 2020 and consists of an anomalous foreground object detection and classification system for panoramic cameras, based on deep learning and supported by low-cost hardware

Future Transportation

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with transportation activities account for approximately 20 percent of all carbon dioxide (co2) emissions globally, making the transportation sector a major contributor to the current global warming. This book focuses on the latest advances in technologies aiming at the sustainable future transportation of people and goods. A reduction in burning fossil fuel and technological transitions are the main approaches toward sustainable future transportation. Particular attention is given to automobile technological transitions, bike sharing systems, supply chain digitalization, and transport performance monitoring and optimization, among others

Gothic economies: Global capitalism and the boundaries of identity

Since Dickens and Mary Shelley, the Gothic has provided a rubric for literary conceptualizations of modernity. Dickens\u27 depictions of industrial London characterize it as a labyrinth of temptations and horrors, haunted by monstrosity and by personal and social demons; the monster in Mary Shelley\u27s Frankenstein is the disfigured byproduct of science and technology. Bram Stoker\u27s Dracula, perhaps the most effective global narrative to come out of the British fin de siecle, grafted elements of a pre-Enlightenment atavism onto the turn-of-the-century liberal metropolis. In our own era, the literature of the postmodern technopolis---the fiction of William Gibson, for example---has continued to borrow Gothic motifs and devices. This dissertation is a study of literary representations of technology, capitalism and the modern metropolis---representations based in the anxieties and desires that accompany middle-class self-fashioning. The Gothic, in its original guise, depicts the corruption and ruination of the estate, often by economic and cultural forces emanating from the city and associated with capitalism and modernity; thus, to invoke the Gothic is also to reference middle class guilt and doubts about legitimacy. At the same time, Gothic allusions allow the middle class to retell its foundational myth of a struggle for liberation from feudal constraints. Much 19th and 20th literature, both popular and highbrow, entertains an ambiguous and complicated relationship to the city---the site of economic, political and cultural forces which are both liberating and traumatizing. Though capitalism and technology drove its ascendancy, the middle class has traditionally seen the city as a place both of opportunity and danger, of allure and revulsion or horror---a set of mixed emotions which tends to suggest an insecure, unstable or divided subjectivity. This complicated relationship to the city provided much of the impetus for the quest to build a bourgeois utopia ---a refuge located at the fringe of the city in which the equilibrium of a romanticized pre-urban order is recovered. But because the contradictions within middle class identity can never be fully resolved, the utopia always harbors the potential to become a haunted grove, visited by that which has been repressed or abjected in the process of creating modernity

Strategies to Address Nighttime Crashes at Rural, Unsignalized Intersections, TR-540, 2008

Citizens request the installation of roadway lighting in their communities based on several motivations, including the experience or perception that lighting improves traffic safety and reduces crime, while also providing a tangible benefit of taxpayer dollars at work. Roadway authority staff fully appreciate these citizen concerns; however, roadway lighting is expensive to install, supply energy to, and maintain in perpetuity. The installation of roadway lighting is only one of a number of strategies agencies have to address nighttime crash concerns. This research assists local agencies in deciding when, where, and how much rural intersection lighting to provide

Revision of the EU Green Public Procurement Criteria for Street Lighting and Traffic Signals - Preliminary Report

Lighting is used on more than 1.6 million km of roads in EU28 countries, accounting for some 35 TWh of electricity consumption (1.3% of total electricity consumption) and costing public authorities almost €4000 million each year. A broad review of relevant technical, policy, academic and legislative literature has been conducted. This report examines the current market situation and the potential for reducing environmental impacts and electricity costs by assessing the recent developments in road lighting technology, particularly LEDs. Particularly important areas identified relate to energy efficiency, light pollution, product durability and, specifically for longer lasting and rapidly evolving new LED technologies, reparability and upgradeability. The information in this report shall serve as a basis for discussion with stakeholders about the further development and revision of EU GPP criteria for street lighting and traffic signals.JRC.B.5-Circular Economy and Industrial Leadershi