Integrating discrete event and lighting simulation for analyzing construction work zones lighting plans

Nighttime construction is being widely adopted in the United States as a way to mitigate the impact of construction operations on the traveling public. Although a number of states have developed standard specifications for nighttime lighting, these standards are usually in the form of generic requirement statements that only specify minimum illuminance levels. The lighting standards do not include specific ways to achieve this illuminance level, such as lighting arrangements and configurations for various work zone plans and construction operations. This leaves confusion between the traffic engineers and the contractors and does not guarantee consistency in those plans, thus affecting productivity and safety. Therefore there is a need to develop a tool that can help contractors and engineers to design and implement lighting plans for nighttime construction. The main objective of this paper is to present a new lighting design framework that utilizes three dimensional lighting analysis and construction operation simulation to study and model lighting conditions of a construction site. A prototype software tool called NiteLite that implements the proposed framework was developed and is presented here. Various lighting plans can be studied using the software to provide for typical applications including lighting fixture's locations, fixture photometric web, mounting height, angle, and fixture type. The results from the developed software tool were validated through comparisons with previous research conducted using field measurements. It has been shown that NiteLite can provide accurate lighting analysis, as well as having the ability to model a wider range of conditions and work zone configurations and considering new lighting criteria such as Glare Rating. Furthermore, NiteLite allows users to study the dynamic nature of lighting in construction sites by allowing the animation of expected equipment and traffic patterns and thus studying the impact of lighting conditions on glare in the construction site.