Optimization of Public Lighting Projects

Currently the Public Lighting (PI) projects, i.e. streets, avenues, squares, parking lots and the like are carried out with the use of commercial or free software, in general supplied by manufacturers or groups of manufacturers of lighting products, applying the Point to Point Method to calculate the lighting levels. Other points in common are: the lack of concern in reducing the costs of the projects and the difficulty in modifying the structures used, such as: location and height of the poles and luminaries, angle of inclination of the luminaries, number of luminaries per pole, among others. Any change in the structures will have to be done manually, usually in a CAD environment, to later obtain the new results and compare them with the previous ones. To assist in this task, it is proposed here the use of the Ant Colony Metaheuristic, where the parameters and location of the structures are defined automatically, in order to meet the lighting levels established in the technical standards, besides optimizing the material cost per area unit.