Design processes associated with many products and facilities are increasingly being adapted for computer implementation. Such computer aided design, or CAD, has proven invaluable in providing both time and cost savings for manufacturers and customers alike.
One industry that has seen an increased use of CAD in recent years is the lighting industry. Many lighting industry products and their components, such as individual luminaires and lighting control circuitry, are now being designed via CAD methods. Indeed, complete lighting installations for physical plant and other facilities may also be designed via CAD methods. As in other industries, the design of such lighting products and facilities via computer has markedly decreased both the time and costs associated therewith.
However, there is a constant and ongoing effort to increase the speed and efficiency of CAD methods in order to further decrease product and facility design time. Moreover, with respect to CAD methods for designing lighting installations specifically, a variety of other problems also exist.
Most prominent among these problems is the inability of such methods to merely update design calculations given only minimal changes to input data. Typical CAD methods for designing lighting installations determine light levels in a lighting area based upon such input data as luminaire numbers, locations and aiming, luminaire photometry, lighting area geometry, and various surface reflectance values. However, even after only minimal input data changes, such methods unnecessarily repeat all design calculations, even those associated with unchanged input data. As a direct result of such design calculation inefficiencies, design time for the lighting installation is needlessly lengthened.
Typical CAD methods for designing lighting installations are also unable to account for any type of obstructions located in the lighting area other than vertical walls or partitions, or horizontal workplanes or surfaces. Thus, obstructions in the form of solid objects or sloped planes must either be approximated or disregarded entirely during design calculations, thereby decreasing the accuracy of the light level values finally determined.
Moreover, typical CAD methods for designing lighting installations fail to discriminate among reflective surfaces within the lighting area based on their relative importance to final light level determinations. That is, rather than concentrate on reflective surfaces that significantly affect final light level determinations, such methods treat all reflective surfaces equally, thereby sacrificing accuracy in final light level determinations.
Finally, such methods, as well as other CAD methods generally, also suffer from an inability to manipulate input data three-dimensionally in spatial views of the product or facility on a computer monitor. That is, in a spatial view of the product or facility, existing CAD methods display a cursor that is capable of only two-dimensional movement in a single, fixed plane. Thus, before a CAD operator may select a three-dimensional location shown in the spatial view, the operator must first switch to a two-dimensional plan view of the product or facility in order to fix one of the three spatial coordinates necessary to select the three-dimensional location.
Thus, an improved method and system for designing lighting installations would further reduce lighting installation design time. Such a method and system would also be capable, in the event of only partial input data changes, of performing only those design calculations related to such changes. In such a manner, the method and system would further reduce lighting installation design time by increasing design calculation efficiency.
An improved method and system for designing lighting installations would also account for a wider variety of lighting area obstructions, such as solid objects or sloped planes, thereby increasing the accuracy of the light level values determined. Such a method and system would also discriminate among reflective surfaces based upon the relative importance of each reflective surface to final light level determinations to again increase the accuracy of the light levels determined. Finally, such a method and system would also be capable of three-dimensional manipulation of input data, such as luminaire numbers and locations, in a spatial view of the lighting area on a computer monitor.