Electric Utility: Lighting Study

[VillageOf_Lake_Placid]

I work for a small municipal electric utility in northern NY. The utility has recently started phasing out older HPS streetlights in favor of newer LED fixtures. Prior to the development of our utility maps, currently less than a year old, the utility would hire an outside company to come in and perform a lighting study on areas in question. Now that we have a functioning utility map it would be convenient to use it to perform a lighting study in house. Does anyone have any experience using ArcGIS in this way?

The main thing that I would like to do is find a way to plot luminaire isoline profiles on our map. That way we can see if the streetlight arm needs to be adjusted or replaced. 

In addition, I've looked at several different lighting software programs, such as AGI32 and DIALux, which seem useful. however, the process of converting sections of our map to CAD and importing and adjusting in those programs is rather burdensome.

I am hoping someone with more experience and can give a recommendation.

[LongDinh]

This really fascinates me. To preface, I have no experience with lighting software or technicalities but I can share a potential solution in the ArcGIS environment to help you understand lighting areas.

Given you have a luminaire isoline profile for each streetlight type (by bulb type?), and the height and orientation of the streetlight, you could write a Python script to generate/draw the luminaire isoline profile at each of the streetlight x,y locations.

Maybe your reporting statistic is % coverage of a road network which for a given road network, you could CLIP by the isoline profiles and get the difference in SHAPE lengths of the road network to determine the % coverage. 

Anyways, I'm just throwing ideas around to an interesting problem.

[VillageOf_Lake_Placid]

That would be a fantastic idea. Currently the major issue is that we only have photometric files for each light type, so we need to convert each one into an isoline profile. However, the current process for getting these profiles is kind of a pain. We open the photometric files in AGI32, convert it to Cad, then convert it again into ArcGIS Pro. There has to be a better way to get a photometric file to create a usable isoline for Arcgis Pro.

Once we get this working I think your suggestion to determine the coverage is a great idea. I will have to give it a try.

It is an interesting predicament, it might be that we are asking for to much. The few examples of utilities and cities that use Arcgis to display light coverage and intensity have all used a simple buffer. Not taking into account the actual distribution of the light.

[LongDinh]

If you looking to generate light intensity, it would be best to use a raster data type.

The isoline profile generator should be able to generate raster cell values at a given x,y location and distance from the x,y location. Hopefully there's a relationship between height, orientation and bulb type which determines the light intensity.

Once you have all streetlights mapped and profiled, you can do a cumulative sum of overlapping cells with a threshold of 100 (for 100%) or have an IF raster condition to determine if it is intense or not e.g. >30% intensity is a pass for coverage otherwise, not intense enough.

So it's certainly possible!