Digital Twins for Street Lighting: Challenges for a Virtual Reality solution based on Internet-of-Things Devices and Photometry Rendering

Public lighting systems are an essential infrastructure that allows to shape the functional use of the urban spaces. With the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT), the street lighting infrastructure is considered the backbone of smart cities services, providing connectivity and access to the power grid. Therefore, improving its management is essential towards digitalization of cities. To this end, a combination of Digital Twin (DT), IoT and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies appears to be an optimal tool to enhance the street lighting management. A Digital Twin differentiates from models and simulations because it enables mutual interaction between the physical and digital world in real-time. Sensors and IoT technologies handle the transfer of information to update the virtual model according to the physical counterpart’s live changes and vice-versa. The goal is to provide technicians, stakeholders, and managers with an interactive tool to foster a data-driven understanding of the outdoor lighting system that improves their decision-making. The introduction of VR is particularly promising since it allows a realistic, controlled, and intuitive reproduction of real environments at scale. However, several challenges arise when practically building such DT. Based on CEDINT-UPM experience – which is currently working on a DT solution for monitoring the performance of the outdoor lighting installations at a university campus –, we would like to highlight our experience and the lessons learnt during its implementation. The focus of this work is on the communication aspects with IoT systems and the rendering of realistic lighting effects. To this end, our objective is three-fold: 1) to highlight the main challenges faced towards its development and deployment; 2) to introduce the technical solutions to overcome such challenges; and 3) to outline the desirable features aiming at expanding its functionalities.