Active Monitoring and Control of Light Fixtures during Building Construction and Operation: Cyber-Physical Systems Approach

Abstract

Digitally addressable lighting systems offer tremendous opportunities for performance monitoring and control of individual light fixtures. However, the locations of individual light fixtures within a building are not easily differentiable; as such, facility managers cannot distinguish and control each fixture. Virtual models contain semantic representations of objects that enable users to visually identify, distinguish, and interactively monitor building components, thus providing opportunities for controlling components. To monitor and control light fixtures from these models, each physical fixture needs to be tightly integrated with its virtual representation in order to enable bidirectional coordination. Bidirectional coordination between virtual models and physical light fixtures offers tremendous opportunities for enhancing progress monitoring during construction and performance monitoring and control during the operations and maintenance phase of a building’s life cycle. This paper presents an approach to facilitating this through cyber-physical systems integration between virtual models and physical light fixtures. The importance of actively monitoring and controlling light fixtures is highlighted. A cyber-physical systems architecture that illustrates the key features, enabling technologies and their roles, is presented. The paper also presents a prototype system that has been developed and implemented to demonstrate the functionality of the proposed approach.