What UK authorities told us about the future of street-lighting systems

Street-lighting teams do not need another system. They need fewer systems, less duplication and more control.

That was one of the clearest conclusions from a recent Valiciti survey carried out with the UK Roads Liaison Group and ADEPT. The responses came from authorities working with different technologies, suppliers and operating models, but several themes appeared repeatedly.

The first was integration.

Authorities often operate a central management system, an asset-management system, a highways or works-management platform, energy and settlement processes, contractor systems and spreadsheets. In theory, these systems exchange information. In practice, the joins are often where the work begins.

Data is duplicated. Asset records drift apart. Integrations solve part of a workflow rather than the whole workflow. People spend time checking which system is correct and moving information between them.

The result is an odd contradiction: street lighting has become increasingly digital, while significant parts of the operation remain dependent on manual reconciliation.

Supplier dependence remains a concern

The second recurring theme was dependence on suppliers.

Long-term supplier relationships are not inherently a problem. Street lighting is specialist infrastructure and good suppliers create real value. The difficulty arises when an authority's technology choices, data, integrations and operational knowledge become so closely tied to one supplier that changing anything becomes difficult or expensive.

This can reduce competition over time. A controller decision becomes a CMS decision. A software renewal becomes a hardware decision. An integration that should be straightforward becomes a bespoke project.

Authorities told us that they want more control over those choices and, in some cases, better service and value from the relationships they already have.

The answer is not simply to replace one supplier with another. It is to design the technology and operating model so that the authority retains meaningful choice.

Smaller teams are being asked to do more

The third issue was operational capacity.

Budgets remain under pressure and street-lighting teams are often smaller than they once were. At the same time, the amount of information available to them has increased dramatically.

Modern connected lighting can generate alarms, communications events, energy readings, asset changes, maintenance information and performance reports at enormous scale.

More data should make the operation easier. Too often it creates another layer of work.

A system that produces ten thousand alarms has not necessarily helped. The useful question is which of those alarms matter, why they occurred and what should happen next.

That distinction is becoming increasingly important.

The next generation should remove work

For much of the last decade, the street-lighting technology market has concentrated on connectivity: connecting more lights, collecting more data and providing more dashboards.

The next phase needs to concentrate on operational outcomes.

That means bringing control and asset information closer together, reducing duplication between systems, using open interfaces wherever practical and automating routine interpretation and reporting.

AI has a role here, but only if it does useful work.

The objective should not be to add an AI assistant to another dashboard. It should be to reduce the amount of time people need to spend looking at dashboards in the first place.

Can the system identify an abnormal lamp-power reading in context? Can it distinguish a communications issue from a likely equipment fault? Can it find inconsistent inventory information? Can it prepare reports without someone rebuilding the same spreadsheet every month?

Those are much more useful tests of intelligence than whether a product contains an AI feature.

Independence matters as technology changes

Open integration is another important part of the answer.

Lumino has been built to support controller-gateway integration using the publicly available TALQ protocol. The significance is not the protocol name itself. It is the ability to separate the management platform from individual controller suppliers.

That gives an authority more freedom to select future hardware based on cost, performance, availability and service rather than simply because it is the hardware supported by an incumbent CMS.

The same principle should increasingly apply to other parts of the operation: systems should exchange useful information without requiring the entire lighting service to be built around one technology supplier.

Our response: make the operation simpler

These survey findings have strongly influenced how we are developing Lumino and the wider Valiciti service model.

Lumino brings central management and asset management into one operational environment. Automation is being used to remove repetitive tasks rather than simply generate more information. Open integration is intended to preserve customer choice. And Valiciti Operations is being developed so authorities can decide how much of the routine operational workload they want to retain internally.

Different authorities will make different choices. Some will want to operate the technology themselves. Others will want support with monitoring, data, reporting, energy or fault management. Over time, some may want a more comprehensive managed service.

The important point is that technology should make all of those choices easier.

The survey did not tell us that authorities want more technology.

It told us something more useful: they want street lighting to be easier to operate.