A Swiss technology company called Paradox Engineering is about to start a pilot project to remotely manage the public lighting infrastructure in San Francisco, California.
Paradox Engineering, which specialises in solutions to help create smarter cities, including industrial wireless sensor networks and global virtual networks, has been given the go-ahead by the San Francisco Public Utility Commission (SFPUC) to carry out the pilot project to remotely manage the city’s public lighting.
As well as street lighting, the SFPUC is aiming for the project to lead to the rollout of a citywide secure wireless communication network to monitor and control services such as electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, electricity meters and traffic signals.
Over the next two years, SFPUC intends to replace San Francisco’s high pressure sodium (HPS) light poles with dimmable LED lights that will be remotely managed via an integrated wireless control system.
Paradox Engineering, which was set up in 2005 and is headquartered in Switzerland, will be deploying its wireless full mesh narrowband/broadband communication network to monitor and manage public lighting and other urban services in the city.
The solution is based on Paradox’s PE.AMI, an open standard platform that features hardware, software and a web-based management system for machine-to-machine, smart cities and utility applications.
The pilot project is set to kick off in downtown San Francisco in the next few weeks, starting with the remote monitoring and control of public lighting and then moving to EV charging stations, electricity meters and traffic signals.
“The project we’re piloting with the SFPUC is highly innovative since it puts into practice the new paradigm of the ‘internet of things’, where any object can be associated with an IP address and integrated into a wider network to transmit and receive relevant information,” said Gianni Minetti, president and CEO, Paradox Engineering.
