Optimal placement of light sensor for improving energy efficiency and visual comfort in smart buildings

Abstract

The energy consumed by artificial lighting accounts for a significant part of the energy consumption in buildings. Thus, energy consumption can be significantly decreased using optimization techniques, such as the optimum placement of the lighting sensors. In this paper, an optimal placement method of the light sensors is presented to minimize the lighting system's equipment costs and energy consumption and also meet visual comfort under the requirements of the European standard EN12464–1 regarding illuminance-based criteria. In the beginning, based on the illumination measurement grid's mathematical model, the potential location of the sensors is determined. As an average of the dimming levels of the LED lights, the objective function has been introduced. Then, the illuminance and uniformity levels are defined as constraints for the optimization problem. The Battle Royale Optimization (BRO) algorithm is used to solve the optimization problem. Ultimately, based on the results of the BRO algorithm and the calculation of the illuminance deviation, the optimal location of the light sensors is determined. The proposed method is tested in an office room. A fuzzy logic controller is developed to regulate the lighting control system's dimming levels to evaluate the proposed method's performance with other approaches. The comparison results have shown that the proposed method is superior as regards the number of sensors and the optimal sensor position, significant savings in energy consumption of up to 30.8%, and satisfactory visual comfort per the requirements of the European standard EN12464–1.