Smart Lighting

End to End IoT Application Testing Solutions

Smart lighting solutions cover whole spectrum of the lighting applications such as cloud-based monitoring & control, human centric lighting, energy saving dashboards, building occupancy heatmaps. These solutions need to be thoroughly verified and validated before they get deployed in the field.

This situation demands that an independent third party like PTL must be engaged in the product/solution development life cycle, validating and testing end-to-end complex lighting IoT solutions to help customers deliver robust solutions.

Connectivity Protocol Testing

Smart lighting networks are dominated by various choices of communication protocols. OEMs must to choose to build proprietary or open standards embedding wired and/or wireless connectivity protocols like DMX-512, DALI, Zigbee, Bluetooth Mesh, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, CAN, BACnet. In addition, the IoT revolution demands embedding internet protocols like Haystack, MQTT, CoAP on the north bound side where the data is exposed to the cloud over the internet.

PTL is a pioneer in providing testing solutions across all such communication protocols.

Product Functionality Testing

Product managers must build feature plans and create product requirement documents which forms the basis for product development. Despite following good processes during a typical product life cycle, many products fail in the field, increasing the cost of maintenance with a risk of diminishing the OEMs brand value and market reputation. To minimize such risks, OEMs must engage an independent third party to validate and test their products and solutions.

PTL has experience in testing various lighting functionalities such as auto on/off, dimming, daylighting harvesting, scheduling, correlated color temperature (CCT), occupancy based use cases like heat map, space utilizations, over the network (OTN) firmware upgrade, human centric lighting scenes, integration with various BMS protocols etc.

PTL also has special experience in validating title 24 compliant smart lighting solutions which is part of the California building standards code.

Product Performance Testing

There is an increasing trend in the smart lighting segment to host lighting management solutions over the cloud enabling monitoring and control of multiple connected lighting network from a single location. This causes several challenges for solution providers to meet stringent performance requirements.

In case of standalone products like lighting fixtures, wall controls and environmental sensors, communicating over various lighting protocols becomes a challenge to meet performance requirements even though product functionalities may be working properly.

PTL’s deep domain knowledge and ability to form a simulated environment to validate performance along with its expertise in test automation, creates a compelling option for OEMs to successfully manage product/solution performance challenges.

Software API Testing

Traditional lighting management systems were mainly limited to getting connected with lighting networks, but today they are fully integrated with building management system, elevator systems, access control systems, fire alarm & safety systems, parking systems, camera-based surveillance systems, energy management, weather monitoring systems and facility management systems.

Such independent systems are integrated with each other using application programming interfaces (API’s) which must meet expectations with respect to functionality, performance, reliability and security of the overall system.

PTL’s rich experience in working with such smart and complex IoT enabled solutions using advanced technologies, helps OEMs to arrest defects and drawbacks while deploying APIs in the integrated environment.

Integrated Solution Testing

Today’s lighting management systems demand solutions comprising of various software components all developed through a partner eco system and to be integrated to form the wider solution.

Smart lighting deployments must deal with integration of many third-party systems calling for OEMs to work together. This kind of integrated environment demands an efficient effort in the form of integration testing.

PTL can act as the third eye to make smart lighting solutions reliable, robust and flawless.

Software Application Testing

Smart lighting solutions comprise of cloud, middleware, client-server and embedded software applications, all leading to varied use cases. Before deployment, solution providers must deal with the challenges of building a skilled and knowledgeable in-house workforce to carry out testing during the development life cycle as well as during the final black box testing.

PTL’s rich experience and domain knowledge helps OEM’s with verification and validation of software applications to achieve faster time to market with a robust solution.

UI/UX Testing

Lighting management systems used for controlling and monitoring various systems needs to be easy to use and provide an excellent user experience.

From a business perspective, great UI/UX has become one of the most important aspects of any product’s success in the market. However, testing such applications to ensure that expected levels of UI/UX is a growing challenge for OEMs.

PTL’s deep domain expertise in the smart lighting domain and UI/UX testing experience helps customers build a world class UI/UX capability.

Cloud Testing

Traditional on-premise lighting management systems are transitioning to be hosted on cloud service providers (AWS, Azure or private cloud), enabling remote monitoring and control of connected lighting network. Lighting data from various systems like monitoring & control applications, human centric lighting, energy saving dashboards, building occupancy heatmaps is aggregated through gateways and passed on to the cloud through various IoT and middleware platforms and multiple systems are involved to achieve the expected outcome. OEMs struggle to test and validate these complex and integrated cloud solutions.

PTL, through its deep domain knowledge, IoT technology expertise and skilled cloud technology professionals offers a one-stop-solution for validating and testing cloud-based solutions using advanced methodologies and techniques.

Edge Gateway Testing

Cloud based smart lighting solutions need a secure gateway to communicate data and information from lighting networks to cloud networks over the internet. This need is driving the growth of client-side gateway product lines which have the capability to communicate data from standard south bound protocols like PoE, Zigbee, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Mesh, BACnet to north bound protocols over the internet like Haystack, MQTT, CoAP etc.

Edge gateways are rapidly gaining market share with high compute powered intelligent applications like in-built data analytics, rule engines, control algorithms. Edge gateways have the provision for seamless integration with 3^rd party systems.

PTL has in-depth strength and experience in testing various complex multiprotocol gateway applications including data security and data analytics. OEMs can leverage PTL’s capabilities to shorten time to market and detect product failures before they hit the market.

Mobile Application Testing

The evolution of mobile and IoT technologies are complimenting each other. In the smart lighting sector, smart lighting applications are hosted on the cloud providing easy user access from anywhere using mobile applications thus enabling more end user centric use cases.

There is a growing need to test such mobile applications using native or hybrid platforms. PTL is well equipped with multiple testing solutions for mobile applications.

Data Analytics Testing

Lighting management systems rely on intelligent algorithms to increase the overall energy efficiency, comfort, safety and security for human beings. The data gathered from various sources is analysed using machine learning and deep learning applications. This data is stored in different databases like MongoDB, InfluxDB etc and is further processed for analysis to allow for controlling actions. This brings challenges to solution providers and OEMs in terms of validating such intelligent systems.

PTL’s smart lighting domain experts, data scientists and machine learning experts carry out verification & validation of such systems and help OEMs and solution providers improve time to market with stable bug free products.

Test Automation Solutions

Smart lighting management solutions comprise of cloud-based management systems, on premise management systems, edge gateways, lighting controllers, application specific controllers, sensors. All such systems are categorized either software systems or embedded systems. Stringent performance testing, load testing, stress testing, regression testing, API testing must be carried out on these systems before field deployment. Automated testing using scripting language like python or selenium like tools becomes important to achieve time to market and cost optimization.

PTL’s smart lighting domain experts make use of test automation frameworks like softTAF and other available frameworks and tools to build an automated testing environment to help OEMs achieve their business goals.