UK firm Telensa is combing indoor and outdoor smart lighting controls into a single building management system for the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham in the UK.
The arrangement with the NEC is one of the first examples of integrated management of the twin control indoor/outdoor systems, according to the firm. “Until recently, they have been completely separated,” explains Keith Day, chief commercial officer at Telensa.
Speaking to Enterprise IoT Insights, as part of a wide-ranging new report on the state of connected lighting as a platform for smart cities and smart buildings, Day says the work with the NEC blurs the lines between the two disciplines, which have developed along separate paths.
He comments: “The project with the NEC is ground-breaking, in its way, where the building management system has been integrated into our outdoor lighting system, which runs the car park lighting around the site.
“It is quite a big outdoor lighting deployment. But the building management system is controlling everything that happens outside as well. So It has blurred the lines between buildings management and smart-city systems. And we expect to see more of that.”
It is notable, the outdoor lighting comes under the control, also, of the facility manager. Telensa highlights outdoor lighting setups it has with various properties, including ports, stations, and retail sites. It highlighs work with UK property development company British Land, which claims to manage £15.4 billion of assets.
These include 22.5 million square metres of floor space, with around 40 per cent in multi-let retail complexes and 43 per cent in so-called campus spaces, and most of it (61 per cent) based in London. But outdoor parking and open spaces are associated with many of these properties; lighting of these often goes to the firm.
Day says: “We have enterprise customers that have a lot of indoor lights, as well – customers like British Land, for example, which has all sorts of distribution sites and retail sites, and a number of airports and ports, which are in a similar situation. But these are enterprises, and their outdoor lighting is an extension of their building management systems.”
These are using Telensa’s central management system (CMS), called PLANet, for their outdoor lighting; but theset setups may be combined with their indoor building management systems, as with the NEC.
New editorial report from Enterprise IoT Insights – called Smart Lighting as a Platform for Buildings and Cities’ – is available to download in full (for free) here.
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Shiv has over 8 years experience working on Internet of Things and an avid user of Drones
