Best Practices

A Fundamentally Different Approach

For over a century, street lighting has worked the same way: install a fixture, turn it on at dusk, turn it off at dawn. Every light runs at the same output, every night, regardless of what’s happening on the ground. A crosswalk and a cul-de-sac get the same treatment. A rainy Tuesday night and Halloween evening are lit identically.

Photometrics AI introduces a different way to think about street lighting. Instead of one fixed output per luminaire, every light is designed for multiple contexts — each with its own optimized illumination profile based on real-world geography and actual conditions.

One Light, Many Designs

The core of the system is the Target Lighting Layer (protected under U.S. Patent 9,894,736 and patent pending 18/660,680) — a GIS-based map that specifies exactly how much light should reach every location: crosswalks, bike lanes, residential zones, commercial districts, and environmentally sensitive areas.

But here’s what makes it powerful: you don’t just create one Target Lighting Layer. You create many — each designed for a different context:

• Default — The everyday operating profile, optimized from dusk to dawn
• Late Night — Reduced output after midnight when pedestrian activity drops
• Wet Weather — Enhanced illumination for rain-slick roads and reduced visibility
• Halloween — Local roads and cul-de-sacs lit to crosswalk levels for trick-or-treaters
• Weekend Events — Enhanced lighting around venues before and after a nighttime fair or game
• Migratory Bird Season — Dimmed output in low-speed, low-crime areas during peak migration hours
• Demand Response — Strategic dimming during grid emergencies to avoid cascading outages

Each of these is a complete lighting design — not a crude percentage reduction, but a precise optimization that accounts for every luminaire’s position, elevation, beam pattern, and relationship to its neighbors.

You Set the Priorities

What happens when it’s raining on a Saturday night during a downtown festival? Multiple contexts apply simultaneously. The system resolves this through a priority hierarchy that you configure.

A typical hierarchy might look like:

1. Emergency dispatch — always highest, activated by real-time triggers
2. Grid emergency — demand response when the grid needs relief
3. Transportation safety — wet weather, construction zones
4. Crime prevention — enhanced lighting in high-risk areas
5. Special events — festivals, holidays, game nights
6. Environmental protection — migratory bird alerts from BirdCast
7. Default profile — the baseline for ordinary nights

The rule is simple: the highest-priority active context wins. No averaging, no compromising. If it’s raining during a festival, and your hierarchy puts transportation safety above special events, the wet-weather design takes precedence — because keeping drivers safe on slick roads matters more than ambiance.

This is your system. You decide what matters most for your community.

Precision, Not Guesswork

For each Target Lighting Layer, Photometrics AI’s optimization engine determines the exact dimming level for every luminaire — accounting for real-world geometry, overlapping beam patterns, elevation changes, and lighting standards like ANSI/IES RP-8, CIE 115, or AS/NZS 1158.

The result is coordinated, standards-compliant lighting across the entire system. And because human eyes cannot perceive brightness changes under 20% — especially at night — a light running at 72% looks identical to one at 100%, but uses substantially less energy.

The Value

By optimizing performance across the entire system, communities achieve better outcomes with the infrastructure already in place. No hardware replacement. No costly retrofits. Just software, delivered through the APIs of existing networked lighting controls.

The implementation of Photometrics AI results in $48.89 per streetlight per year in direct energy, maintenance, and safety-related value.

Key Advantages

• ~25% energy savings by coordinating all light sources to work together as a system
• No hardware replacement — integrates seamlessly with existing networked lighting controls through secure APIs
• Visually seamless — strategic grouping means all lighting looks the same to the human eye
• Patent-protected — Target Lighting Layer technology is unique to Photometrics AI