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Choosing a street lighting management platform.
The software is the part of a smart street lighting system a city lives with every day, and the part hardest to change later. Here is what a management platform actually does, what separates one from another, and what to check before committing a network to it.
What is a street lighting management platform?
A street lighting management platform is the software that monitors and controls a city’s connected luminaires from a single map, turning each fixture into an addressable asset with a schedule, a dimming profile, measured energy use and a fault history.
It sits above the controllers on the poles and the gateways that carry their traffic. The platform holds the inventory, applies schedules and dimming profiles by group or zone, records energy consumption per fixture, raises an alarm when a lamp fails, and hands that alarm to the maintenance system as a work order. A capable platform does this for hardware from more than one manufacturer, so a city is not locked into whoever supplied the first phase.
Choosing a street lighting management platform.
What the platform is responsible for
Three jobs separate a management platform from a dashboard: it holds the authoritative asset inventory, it acts on the network rather than only observing it, and it hands what it learns to the systems a city already runs.
- Inventory and map: every luminaire as an addressable asset, with its location, its controller, its lamp type and its history.
- Control: schedules, dimming profiles and adaptive scenarios applied by group or zone rather than fixture by fixture.
- Measurement: energy, current, voltage, power factor and burn time recorded per fixture, which is what turns a savings claim into a report.
- Fault detection: a failed lamp, a power fault or a lost connection raises an alarm automatically, instead of waiting for a resident to call.
- Handover: that alarm becomes a work order in the maintenance system, and the asset record reaches the city’s GIS.
The products behind the platformWhat smart street lighting is
Multi-vendor is the question that decides the next twenty years
A streetlight controller is a twenty-year asset, and no city replaces its whole network at once. That makes one question more consequential than any feature comparison: can the platform manage nodes it did not supply?
Dimonoff | SCMS manages nodes from other manufacturers alongside its own. Montréal runs 132,500 nodes from several vendors, Current by GE and Telematics Wireless among them, on one platform, migrated neighbourhood by neighbourhood rather than in a single cutover.
Integration, or the platform becomes another silo
A lighting platform that cannot talk to the systems around it moves work rather than removing it. Ask which integrations are running in production today, not which are possible.
- Asset and GIS: ArcGIS/Esri, so the lighting inventory is the same inventory the rest of the city uses.
- Maintenance: Oracle EAM, or any CMMS through the API, so a fault opens a ticket where crews already look.
- Reporting: Power BI, Grafana and Microsoft Azure, for the figures a council asks for.
- Traffic and parking: Intelight MAXVIEW 2.0 and Parknet/Parquery.
- Everything else: a bidirectional REST API, which is what makes the list above extendable rather than final.
Hosting, security, and what happens when the link drops
Two questions decide whether a platform survives an IT review. Where does the data live, and what does the network do without it?
Dimonoff | SCMS runs on certified cloud hosting with data residency in Canada, or on-premise where an organisation requires it. The radio network is encrypted with AES-128, access is per named account with role-based privileges and OAuth 2.0 authentication, and a SOC 2 Type II audit has been completed at Groupe Vectanor level.
The second question matters more than it sounds. Nodes keep their schedule locally if the link drops, so a communications outage interrupts the reporting, not the street.
Questions about lighting management software
Can one platform manage streetlight controllers from different manufacturers?
Yes, if it was built for it. Dimonoff | SCMS manages nodes from Honeywell EnergyAxis, Current by GE, Telematics Wireless and Pharos DMX alongside Dimonoff’s own. Montréal runs 132,500 nodes from several vendors on a single platform, which is what allows a city to migrate in phases instead of replacing a whole network at once.
How many luminaires can a street lighting management platform handle?
Dimonoff | SCMS addresses up to 1,000,000 nodes or sensors per system, in real time. In practice the layer a city sizes first is the gateway: one G4 gateway manages up to 1,000 wireless nodes, so coverage grows by adding gateways.
What happens to the lights if the platform is unreachable?
Nothing visible on the street. Each node stores its own schedule and keeps running it locally when the connection drops. Firmware is updated over the air across the fleet, with a change notice and the customer’s approval before deployment.
Is there a lighter option than the full platform?
Yes. DOO Express is the cost-effective alternative for smaller lighting and IoT projects, with the same map-based remote control and a smaller feature set.
Bring us your network as it is.
Mixed vendors, partial coverage, an inventory in a spreadsheet — tell us what you have and we will show you what a single platform would do with it.