Development of a Dimming Lighting Control System Using General Illumination and Location-Awareness Technology

Abstract

As part of ongoing research into saving lighting energy, studies on lighting control integrating location-awareness technologies have recently been increasing, but these have led to the indoor illuminance imbalance problem by controlling only the lighting adjacent to the occupant. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop a dimming lighting control system using general illumination and location-awareness technology by integrating general illumination and dimming technology with lighting control technology that is based on location-recognition, and to verify the effectiveness of this system. This study built a full-scale test bed to evaluate the performance of the developed technology, and derived the energy reduction rate and indoor light environment improvement rate to evaluate the performance of dimming lighting control (Case 1), dimming lighting control using location-awareness technology (Case 2), and dimming lighting control using general illumination and location-awareness technology (Case 3). The conclusions are as follows. (1) Case 3 reduces lighting energy by 47.9–64.2% as compared to Case 1, and Case 3 reduces lighting energy compared to Case 2 when there are three occupants. (2) Case 3 improves indoor light environment comfort by increasing the uniformity by 17.8–49% compared to Case 2. These results confirm the effectiveness of Case 3 proposed in this study.