Streetlight Sensor Synchronization for Network-Wide Last Known States
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing aerial lighting fixtures face challenges in maintaining a consistent last known state, especially after incidents that affect multiple fixtures, making it difficult to determine the status of each light source and potential damage.
Innovation Solution
Implementing smart sensor devices with a NEMA-style connector to streetlight fixtures that synchronize local clocks to a common clock, allowing real-time monitoring and storage of event data, which can be aggregated to determine a last known state across a network of fixtures.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If conventional light controllers are used in aerial lighting fixtures, then the lighting control function is achieved, but the ability to maintain and retrieve last known state after incidents is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The system continuously updates and stores the last known state of each lighting fixture in real-time before incidents occur. This preliminary action ensures that when an incident happens (such as a hurricane toppling fixtures), the most recent operational state is already recorded and can be retrieved for assessment and recovery.
Solution Approach 2:
A centralized server acts as an intermediary between multiple aerial lighting fixtures and the control system. The server collects state information from fixtures, maintains the last known state database, and provides this information for incident assessment. This intermediary approach allows distributed fixtures to maintain state information without each fixture needing complex local storage and retrieval capabilities.
2Productivity
If multiple aerial lighting fixtures are monitored independently, then individual fixture control is achieved, but system-wide incident assessment becomes difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The system merges state information from multiple independently monitored aerial lighting fixtures into a centralized database on the server. Each fixture continues to operate independently with its own controller, but their state information is combined at the system level, enabling comprehensive incident assessment across the entire lighting network without losing individual fixture autonomy.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements continuous feedback loops where each lighting fixture reports its operational state to the centralized server, which then maintains an updated record of the last known state for all fixtures. This feedback mechanism ensures that system-wide incident assessment can be performed by retrieving and analyzing the aggregated state information from all fixtures.
3Measurement precision
If real-time state monitoring is implemented across dispersed fixtures, then accurate last known state is achieved, but synchronization complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system establishes a common reference time baseline for all dispersed lighting fixtures by synchronizing their local clocks to a centralized clock source. This creates an equipotential time reference across the entire system, allowing accurate timestamping and correlation of state changes across all fixtures without each fixture needing complex independent synchronization mechanisms.
Data Source
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AI summary
A system to coordinate event data from a plurality of smart sensor devices that are coupled to streetlight fixtures to generate a last known state across the plurality of smart sensor devises. The plurality of smart sensor devices receive a distributed clock that is common among the smart sensor devices. A local clock of each smart sensor device is synchronized to the distributed clock. Each smart sensor device monitors and stores event data in an incident buffer. The stored event data is correlated to the distributed clock. The stored correlated event data is transmitted to a remote server. The remote server aggregates the correlated event data from the plurality of smart sensor devices based on the distributed clock to generate a last known state across the plurality of smart sensor devices.