Use of Public Lighting System to Deploy a Comprehensive Smart City Platform

The City of Paris aims to reduce its public lighting energy consumption by 30% by 2020. Paris has made a smart city-ready lighting grid covering the entire city. This helps minimize its lighting system’s environmental impact and improve citizens’ public safety and user experience. It can be used to easily scale its service area to connect future smart services.

Innovation Summary

Innovation Overview

To meet the demands of growing urban populations and adhere to the Paris Climate Agreement, cities across the globe are looking for ways to get the most out of the critical services they already have, while trying to meet citizen expectations to become more responsive, efficient, and help reach climate change goals.

The City of Paris aims to reduce its public lighting energy consumption by 30% by 2020. In order to help reach this goal and achieve a more resilient and suitable lighting system, the City of Paris has deployed a radio network to connect above-ground and subterranean cabinet-based controllers for street and traffic lights across the 105 square kilometers of Paris. With no modifications to the existing infrastructure, new and upgraded control boxes are installed to establish a command of the public lighting system that also provides smart city capabilities.

The deployment—in partnership with energy services company EVESA and Silver Spring Networks—initiated in 2015, saw dramatic results within the first nine months, including:
• 180,000 streetlights connected through 16,000 cabinet meters.
• Communication capabilities for precise timing of 1,800 existing traffic signals.
• Ambient brightness detection to switch on / off controls
• 99.5% network reliability to enable real-time street light switching factoring in the level of ambient light and turning on the public lighting of the whole city in 2 minutes from east to west.
• Real time command of the public lighting and illumination sites, specific timetables upon request.
• Better management of the public lighting system via data returns, metering capabilities, and fault detection.
The standards-based network infrastructure that the City of Paris has deployed can also be used to easily scale its service area to connect future smart services, such as environmental sensors, smart parking, exploitation and sharing of data, traffic management, and individual lighting controls, predictive maintenance. The initial scope of implementation included a pilot deployment in the very centre of Paris (around the Halles, Louvre, and Palais Bourbon area). Today, it is implemented all across the city.
Current State of Implementation : The implementation of smart streetlight and traffic signal controls has been fully deployed across Paris nine months of implementation, 180,000 streetlights and 1,800 traffic signal cabinets across the City were connected, and those streetlights had 99.5% reliability for real-time switching.
Results : The control of the lighting is more reliable than it used to be, and entirely adjustable to the requests and schedule of the City. The system allows for real-time control, better maintenance, and is smart city ready. The project is fully deployed, its performance confirmed, and the capabilities for real-time control and remote management were tested. It is considered operational.

Innovation Description

What Makes Your Project Innovative?

This radio communication network is now owned by the municipality, throughout its whole territory, to control their own lighting system, and it can support smart city applications. What is different now is ownership of the infrastructure, openness to various fields of application, resilience of the system. A need was identified by the obsolescence of the previous network used by the city. It was crucial that the city of Paris would, through this innovation, become the owner of the technical infrastructure. This makes it possible to adapt the system to the needs of the population and various users. For instance, the city of Paris decided last year to open all the public gardens 24 hours a day, as a response to the heat wave issue during the summer.

What is the current status of your innovation?

Current State of Implementation : The implementation of smart streetlight and traffic signal controls has been fully deployed across Paris. Within nine months of implementation, 180,000 streetlights and 1,800 traffic signal cabinets across the City were connected, and those streetlights had 99.5% reliability for real-time switching.
Since 2017, the radio communication network is also used to make light point remote management. In new projects, light dimming uses this radio communication network and no longer 3G.
Finally, in 2018, presence detection sensors also communicate via this network.

Innovation Development

Collaborations & Partnerships

EVESA had the technical expertise and the knowledge about the previous system SSN bring the innovative technology for software and hardware IT Department of the City of Paris bring the possibility to connect to the broadband network of the city Public Lighting Department provided the necessary coordination between the actors.

Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Citizens can see the experimentation in their neigborhood. The initial scope of implementation included a pilot deployment in the very centre of Paris (around the Halles, Louvre, and Palais Bourbon area). Today, it is implemented all across the city. Citizens can see the experimentation in their neighborhood, whereas public awareness is hard to get in the field of public lighting, and citizens usually only react when there is a problem.

Innovation Reflections

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

Results : The control of the lighting is more reliable than it used to be, and entirely adjustable to the requests and schedule of the City. The system allows for real-time control, better maintenance, and is smart city ready. The project is fully deployed, its performance confirmed, and the capabilities for real-time control and remote management were tested.

Challenges and Failures

The most important challenge was to assure the lighting continuity of service during deployment phase.

Conditions for Success

A good communication between the stakeholders is essential. Also; rushing through the project is not the solution and it is better to take more time for thinking and planning the right way.

Replication

There is a strong potential for replication in other cites which have the same needs as Paris. Lyon and Nantes have already made contact with Paris.

Lessons Learned

Software is very important in this kind of project. We put a lot of efforts into deploying the connecting boxes, but the performance of the software is crucial to control everyday the performance of the system.

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