SLightliMon - Street Lighting lite Monitor
What is SLightliMon?
SLightliMon stands for Street Lighting lite Monitor. It is a free open-source tool written in python v2 for non-real time analysis and detection of alarms on street lighting data measured by power meters. As an example, it can be used at day N to check whether any problem occurred during the night between day N-1 and day N. Moreover, it provides additional relevant information on the monitored power lines that can be used for refining and planning the maintenance of street lighting.
At this stage it should be considered as an experimental tool still under development. However, it is already successfully used for the monitoring of almost 100 power cabinets at my work place.
SLightliMon is at the moment just a little piece of code for the analysis of power profiles. Other open-source-much-bigger projects aimed to provide a whole monitoring platform are ongoing in this field, for example the Open Smart Grid Platform.
SLightliMon includes a profile analyzer that can automatically detect alarms on single power profiles and also detect anomalies with respect to a set of reference profiles (e.g. a number of days preceding the one that is under analysis). A web-based user interface is under development.
Using power meter data, the profile analyzer is able to detect from a single power profile:
- Timestamps of switch ON and switch OFF of a power line, and number of events
- Voltage anomalies
- Low power factor (cos(phi))
- Total energy consumption during the analyzed period.
If a reference period is also given as input, the profile analyzer can also automatically detect (with respect to the reference period):
- Power anomalies: periods with increased/decreased instant power
- Total energy consumption anomalies
The reference period is used to calculate a reference profile that is then compared to the current profile. In this way SLightliMon can for instance automatically adapt the alarm detection to each power line by means of its recent past data.
As explained in detail in the Documentation, the SLightliMon alarm detector can be used with two types of input:
- a Round Robin Database (RRD)
- text files
For further details on the principles at the basis of the profile analysis and alarm detection have a look at the Documentation page, which is anyway mandatory in order to understand what you are doing. Usage and input/output examples are available in the Examples page.
Language: python v2.x
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How to use SLightliMon?
SLightliMon is a shell tool which can use input data provided by third-party metering software or by other self-developed tools. As shown in the Examples page, its output is a JSON structure containing the information retrieved from the input data (e.g., switch ON and OFF timestamps, energy consumption) and the detected alarms (if any). This information can then be used to generate reports, or web pages and so on. Thus, there's no unique answer to the question "how to use it?"... Anyway, you can get some hints for a monitoring framework for street lighting based on free and open-source software in the page Street lighting free monitoring, architecture example.
Resources
Why "lite"??
Well... nowadays in the market there are a lot of commercial so-called "Smart Lighting" solutions that allow real-time monitoring and also remote control even at single lamp level. Such products usually need to install dedicated equipment that span from cabinet power meters to advanced wireless nodes that should be placed within the lamps or at their basis, and provide a dedicated graphical interface for users with all sort of data and alarms. Although these systems are really cool stuff, they often also imply relevant in-field work (e.g., the installation of a wireless node in each lamp) and also the constraint of using certain hardware and software (with some kind of fee). Sometimes all this is not really needed. It is cool to receive a real-time SMS when a lamp burns at 3 a.m., but would you really send somebody to change it immediately? The information collected at the power cabinet the day after is often sufficient to both detect anomalies and to allow for serious maintenance of the whole street lighting system. And if you can do it with free open-source tools it's even better. So, "lite" just means that SLightliMon cannot provide (yet!) the detailed and real-time information alarms of commercial systems. But maybe "lite" is just what you need.
History
...maybe you're curious
SLightliMon is the result of a successful experiment. At work, we wanted to start monitoring our 300+ street lighting power cabinets in order to have precise data on switch ON/OFF timestamps, power consumption, etc. After evaluating different technologies in terms of cost, effort, efficiency and openness, I found out that it was possible to collect the data we needed using an existing open-source SCADA software (in my case Nagios), standard commercial equipment, and a self-developed simple graphical interface. So we decided to experiment it. The experiment was successful, the number of monitored power cabinet increased, but it became difficult and time-consuming to visually detect anomalies in the data... therefore, I developed the basis of what now, after having spent a relevant amount of personal spare time, is called SLightliMon.