A new three-way partnership aims to turn cities’ street lighting systems into Smart Urban Networks to support and manage multiple services through the Internet of Things.
The German smart lighting specialist Osram has chosen Swiss company Paradox Engineering’s PE.AMI technology to enhance its portfolio of LED luminaires for street and urban environments. Osram will equip its Smart City lighting products with Paradox’s network technology to provide cities with the opportunity to turn their public lighting infrastructures into networks that can support and manage multiple urban services, such as parking, traffic and waste management, and environmental monitoring. Since it represents a major financial outlay, has a clear impact on livability, and affects environmental performance, many cities are focusing on smart street lighting programs. Osram offers a complete portfolio of energy-efficient, low-maintenance, durable and reliable LED luminaires to ensure maximum light quality and safety for roads, intersections and parking facilities, as well as pedestrian zones, plazas and urban parks.
Paradox, a member of the Japanese precision components supplier the Minebea Group, is sharing its Smart City vision with Osram to develop innovative solutions based on the Internet of Things (IoT), taking advantage of Minebea’s increasing role in the lighting market, such as its development of SALIOT (Smart Adjustable Light for the Internet Of Things) LED lighting equipment. Paradox’s PE.AMI is a future-proof IoT-ready hardware and software network communication platform, enabling cities to manage and control a number of smart urban services, including seamless public and private lighting.
Based on open standards and agnostic to any object or field device, PE.AMI allows the addition of intelligence to all types of urban sensors, and connect them to a citywide network. A key feature of PE.AMI is its ability to host multiple urban services over the same 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks) infrastructure, even if deployed over time, allowing municipalities to schedule development programs according to priorities and available resources.
By integrating PE.AMI technology, Osram’s LED streetlight devices acquire the capability to provide a telecommunication network for the future, to enable remote control and management of multiple services. Each luminaire will be part of a meshed network, reliable and efficient by design, enabling interconnectivity between luminaires and integrating other data sources, such as the availability of parking spaces, and monitoring sensors of any type.
“From the Internet of Things perspective, we can think of street lighting as a citywide distributed communication system, and leverage it as the backbone to build a genuine smart urban network,” explained Gianni Minetti, president and CEO of Paradox Engineering. “Thanks to our PE.AMI technology, luminaires, as well as the multitude of objects which are disseminated in our cities, are smart nodes of this network, supporting narrowband and broadband wireless communications to enable a number of applications, from public lighting to parking, from energy distribution to video surveillance, and many more. That’s our vision for future-proof cities, and that’s exactly the journey with Osram and our parent company Minebea.”
