Streetlights that "Think" Light Up the "Smart City"

　　Impassable elevated roads, nearly stalled traffic, restless horns… The Shanghai North-South Elevated Road during rush hour replays this scene day after day. Data shows that the North-South Elevated Road is congested 247 out of 365 days a year.

　　Shanghai is just a microcosm of the congestion situation in major Chinese cities. Every year, China incurs over US$40 billion in time, fuel, and environmental costs due to traffic congestion, equivalent to 20% of the annual disposable income of urban residents. The severe social and environmental problems brought by traffic congestion have put forward higher requirements for urban planning and management.

　　The "Internet+" concept is surging like a rising tide. So how should the "Smart City" take root? GE takes a different approach, turning its attention to the seemingly inconspicuous yet ubiquitous streetlights on streets and alleys. When the Industrial Internet meets streetlights, what sparks will fly?

GE has equipped street-side streetlights with a "nervous system" — sensors — that enable the lights to "think." These sensors can keenly perceive their surrounding environment, and through data collection and cloud computing, help the streetlights achieve intelligent energy savings. In addition, the data collected by the sensors is transmitted to servers for categorical processing, and the analysis results will provide robust data support for solving future urban congestion, monitoring parking conditions, and optimizing emergency response mechanisms.

Currently, GE's intelligent lighting system has begun a pilot rollout in San Diego, California, USA. The streets of San Diego have been replaced with highly energy-efficient LED streetlights, helping San Diego tangibly reduce energy consumption and save taxpayer spending. Subsequently, sensors capable of perceiving weather, traffic, and other surrounding conditions will be progressively installed on these streetlights, further enhancing the intelligence of the system.

The intelligent lighting system can not only quickly perceive the environment but also monitor and report urban conditions in real time. Since last year, GE's wireless control technology LightGrid has been applied to 3,000 streetlights in San Diego, providing automatic light adjustment functionality while also enabling smarter equipment maintenance and repair reporting. When the streets are empty, the streetlights can effectively reduce urban electricity consumption by dimming or even turning off the lights. It is projected that this technology will save San Diego nearly $250,000 annually.

In addition, GE also transmits the data collected by the intelligent lighting system to the Predix software platform to achieve cloud-based big data management and predictive analysis. By sharing these data analyses, researchers and application developers can understand urban conditions in a timely and detailed manner, prescribe the right remedies, and develop practical and effective solutions for various urban problems such as traffic congestion, parking order maintenance, and traffic accident monitoring.

These "thinking" streetlights not only make the night dazzling and brilliant, but will also illuminate the "smart city." City managers firmly believe that the introduction of intelligent lighting systems will strongly promote the construction of "smart cities," allowing citizens to share the fruits of "smartness."