(Author: Judy Lin, Chief Editor, LEDinside)

Kaynam Hedayat, VP Marketing and Product Management at Digital Lumens recently spoke to LEDinside about the company’s partnership with Schneider Electric and its advantages in smart lighting operation system.

Digital Lumens announced the partnership with Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management and automation on May, 18 2016.

The enterprise smart lighting specialists’ partnership with Schneider Electric involves innovation in integrating the company’s smart lighting system with the German company’s smart building system, which features several applications including HVAC, security, energy management, lights, and fire and safety.

To enable the integration between Digital Lumen software systems Schneider Electric the company has chosen an open API to integrate the Digital Lumens Management System and vice versa, said Hedayat.

Asked if Digital Lumens lighting products will be sold integrated into Schneider Electric systems existing infrastructure or offered as an additional service, Hedayat responded: “Focus of the partnership is innovation in Smart Building applications and the commercial terms are not yet disclosed.”

Founded in 2008, Digital Lumens is a specialist in the wireless commercial and industrial intelligent lighting systems. Smart lighting operating software has been the backbone of the company’s success in industrial intelligent lighting sector, where it invests more than 50% of R&D annually in software development, said Hedayat. The result is the company’s advanced software that is about two to five years ahead of competitors.

Digital Lumens' smart lighting system is based on a scalable architecture that is capable of augmenting data from thousands of fixtures, using its in-house developed software operation system. The company is not yet considering partnership with other big data specialists, but has continued to scale their solution through a distributed processing architecture where data processing takes place on the sensors as well as the back-end software platform. Leveraging this architecture the system scales as more sensors are deployed.

Operating software is crucial in enterprise scale smart lighting designs, where the most difficult challenge is commissioning large scale fixtures of the luminaire that might require self-configure correlation, dealing with IT departments, and facility managers. Wireless integration reduces installation costs and although requires involvement of IT and facility measures the integration into existing infrastructure is seamless.

The company has chosen ZigBee/802.15.4 wireless smart layer that is optimized for the required scale of the system as well as communication resiliency.

Digital Lumens extends the integration of their system into third party fixtures with their smart control and sensor modules. These modules are integrated through DALI and other industry standard interfaces. The company will continue to invest in scaling up fixtures that can be controlled by the system while enhancing data analytics and scale of the smart lighting platform.

The company in-house designs and engineers the sensor and luminaire products, but outsources the manufacturing all across the globe, said Hedayat. The company which has business in 45 countries, has seen strong growth in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and South America for its smart lighting system.

As for future smart lighting developments, will Visual Light Communication (VLC) be integrated into smart fixtures anytime soon? The lighting expert noted it was an interesting concept but not practical in many applications including indoor positioning for people.

Spurred by developments in IoT, smart lighting will continue to gain traction on the market. “Smart lighting’s market penetration is about 5%,” said Hedayat. With more countries aiming to curb carbon emissions, intelligent lighting has relatively bright prospects in the near future.