AI as a Modern Approach to Street Lighting Design
Ari Isaak, founder of Photometrics.ai, details what the technology can bring to the street lighting category.
By Ari Isaak, GISP, CFLC
The Photometrics.ai system takes street lighting design to a new level that is faster, easier, and more effective than traditional methods. And, most importantly, the end result delivers a better lighting experience for municipalities and the public.
City planners continually strive to provide services more closely aligned with how constituents live their lives. Photometrics.ai greatly expands what lighting designers can do, which opens the door to designing for conditions that were previously impractical to address. Photometrics.ai puts lighting design at the center of many more decisions critical to how cities function.
Here’s how it works: Instead of creating a few typical layouts and applying them across an entire city, designers start by defining the outcome they want to achieve. Then they implement a Target Lighting Layer by specifying horizontal illuminance targets for every polygon in the coverage area — for example, 20 lux for crosswalks, 7 lux for local streets, 0 lux for front yards. Photometrics.ai knows the location, mounting height, orientation, and photometric file for every luminaire being specified and works holistically, calculating how the entire system contributes to meeting the designers’ targets.
Today, about 15% of the world’s streetlights operate via controls that are capable of dimming — but most of these run at fixed output because designing multiple lighting scenarios, let alone designing every light for multiple scenarios, takes too long. The controls and hardware can respond in seconds; the photometric design takes weeks. Photometrics.ai closes that gap, providing photometry at the speed of controls.
This speed means the lighting system can be designed not just for default dusk-to-dawn operation, but for the many situations where the lighting should change — such as before and after a sporting event, during a grid emergency, in rain, for migratory bird alerts, on Halloween, and for national events like Earth Hour.
How Photometrics.ai came to be
Ari Isaak, founder of Photometrics.ai, has been working in street lighting for 15+ years and has been involved in many of the biggest projects in the U.S. from Chicago, Phoenix, and San Francisco to Philadelphia, Boston, Honolulu and many more.
At Evari Consulting, the company Isaak founded in 2011, he was responsible for using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to figure out what different models, types and wattages existed in the field, then apply these few typical layouts to figure out which luminaire would be installed at each location. The difference between the existing luminaire and proposed luminaire was the energy savings.
During this process, Isaak realized there was enormous variety captured in each of the layouts — some locations have medians, slopes, curves, irregular pole spacing, bike lanes, sidewalks, intersections that don’t meet at right angles and variations not captured in the usual layouts, but that made a big difference in how light should perform. Isaak set out to build a system that enabled photometry to account for all these varieties.
Currently Photometrics.ai is in a beta testing mode and is seeking input from lighting designers and lighting manufacturers. If you are interested in participating, reach out to Ari Isaak to learn more or click here to download information on how to participate.
In the tutorial, you can upload GIS data and IES files, create a default full-city schedule, then create a second schedule for a specific neighborhood during specific hours. This is the foundation for managing lighting that responds to how and when people actually use those streets. Try the tutorial for yourself here
I’m excited about this because Photometrics.ai puts excellent lighting design back at the center of street lighting.
