Study of effect of timeout settings on energy saving of lighting systems using queuing model

Limited natural energy resources compel humankind to search for efficient utilization of energy, and thus increasing number of fluorescent lamps are adopted for lighting systems. However, previous study showed that there exists a tradeoff between energy-saving and lifespan for fluorescent lamps. Consequently, it becomes an important topic on how to design an efficient and effective automatic control algorithm in lighting engineering. The problem was traditionally studied by conducting surveys and experiments, which were unavoidably costly and time-consuming. This paper studies the possible application of traffic engineering in automatic lighting control systems. A queuing model is proposed to study a typical lighting system and a simple close-loop algorithm is illustrated to effectively adapt the system settings. Through computer simulation, we show that the proposed method provides an alternative way of studying lighting systems in a cost-effective manner, while providing adequate accuracy.