Fault Light Detection and Identification System using RFID

Muawya Naser and Fadi Abuamara

CIS Department, Abu Dhabi Women’s College, Higher Colleges of Technology, U.A.E.

Keywords: Fault Detection, RFID, Light Sensor, GSM, GPRS.

Abstract: Identifying the faulty lights in big areas is a challenging process. This paper investigates the current fault

light detection solutions. Then, a fault light detection and identification system is proposed to overcome

current solutions' drawbacks especially in indoor facilities. The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is

utilized for the automatic detection and identification of light faults.

1 INTRODUCTION

It is difficult to identify and detect defects in lighting

systems in public places with large areas such as

airports, hospitals, and streets (Chen and Chou,

2015), (Chien, 2007), (Cho et al., 2015). Also, the

need for a skilled person to inspect every light for

the possibility of a defect waste time and efforts in

addition to the possibility of missing near-faulty

lights due to human error and eye fatigue. Therefore,

there is a need for an automatic fault light detection

and identification system. Unfixed faulty lights

increase darkness which negatively affects human’s

safety.

Different solutions were proposed to detect light

faults. In this paper, the proposed solutions are

analysed to identify drawbacks of each system.

Based on the investigated solutions, a fault light

detection and identification system is proposed to

overcome current solution drawbacks specially in

indoor facilities. This paper utilizes Radio

Frequency Identification (RFID) for the automatic

detection and identification of light faults.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows.

Investigation of current fault light detection systems

is elaborated in Section 2. Section 3 illustrates the

proposed RFID-based fault light detection and

identification system. Section 4 analyses the

proposed system while Section 5 concludes the

paper.

2 CURRENT SOLUTIONS

INVESTIGATION

The first use of Radio-Frequency Identification

(RFID) system was used to Identity Friend or Foe

(IFF) during World War II (Domdouzis et al., 2007).

Since that date, different systems were proposed for

human identification, warehouse management, and

toll system; to list a few (Muawya et al., 2008)

Different systems were proposed to detect and

identify light faults. In (Rajput et al., 2013), an

intelligent street lighting system using GSM was

designed to resolve the faulty street light issue. The

main purpose of this device was to track faulty

lamps and send data about this issue to the control

centre. The used system required a microchip to be

installed on the pole lights. The used chips consisted

of a microcontroller along with different sensors,

such as CO2 sensor, smoke sensor, light intensity

sensor, noise sensor, and a GSM module for wireless

data transmission and reception between microchip

and primary concentrator (PC). The PC transmitted

the controlling action to the microchip. The used

system had some weaknesses such as the placement

of the microchip in outdoor which affected the

lifespan of the microchip due to environmental

issues. Also, the high construction cost and required

material made the system uneconomical. These

drawbacks decreased system’s reliability and

increased maintenance and installation costs.

In another work, a smart monitoring fuzzy-based

fault detection system for malfunction traffic light

operation was proposed. The main purpose was to

solve the issue in a rural area or small city that did

Naser, M. and Abuamara, F.

Fault Light Detection and Identiﬁcation System using RFID.

DOI: 10.5220/0006835801250128

In Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Embedded Computing and Communication Systems (PECCS 2018), pages 125-128

ISBN: 978-989-758-322-3

125

not have a traffic monitoring controller. The used

system identified three types of fault which are

amount of the LED brightness, electrical outage, and

physical defect. The system composed a message to

be sent to control room. The used system has same

issues the GSM-based system Rajput et al. had.

Another system (Azura et al., 2013), based on

sequence-fuzzy controller, was used to check the

LED brightness level. The idea is that for each

sequence of traffic light junction and for each pole,

only one of the LEDs will be activated while the

other LEDs will not be activated. If the LED did not

show the correct sequence (Green, Orange, Red), the

LED is diagnosed as faulty and the system send the

notification to control centre to make action. The

used solution was limited to traffic lights only and

cannot be implemented in other fault light detection

systems.

In (Saleem et al., 2015), a street light monitoring

and control system was designed to minimize the

time that a workman spends in searching and

locating the fault light. The light sensors were placed

in all street lights’ circuit to switch on and off

automatically. Once the lights are switched on,

current sensors placed at every light pole were

responsible to send light’s status to a centralized

system using GSM module attached with the circuit.

The proposed system was efficient in outdoor fault

light detection. However, the system was not

economically feasible for indoor big facilities with

huge number of light bulbs. Also, not all light bulbs

come with circuits to make the solution feasible.

In (Kuo-Hsiung et al., 2016), a G3-PLC-based

solution for intelligent street lamp monitoring and

energy management was proposed. The main

purpose of this system was to detect street lamp

issues such as the light is off or missing a wire since

it took a long time to solve it. This system had

weather resistance, 24-hour automatic monitoring,

wide monitoring range, and automatic routing

capability to detect every lamp’s status such as

power consumption, on-off state, and temperature. It

had the features of street lamp energy-saving control

and multiple alarm modes for users to choose. The

management system comprised of street lamps,

street lamp monitoring server, and street lamp

monitoring client-side. If a street lamp had an open

maintenance hole, electricity leak, or did not light, a

warning was sent via power lines to the G3-PLC

host, concentrator, and the server via GPRS or an

SMS short message. The used system was not

economically feasible due to using the GPRS and

SMS messaging. On the other hand, this system

cannot be implemented in indoor places due to the

limited ability of this technique to identify faulty

lights to a small distance accuracy.

In (Sumathi et al., 2017), an arm-based street

lighting system with fault detection was designed to

identify street lamps status where a GSM module

was used to send messages. Each street lamp was

monitored using fault detection circuit. In case of

any faulty lamp, the circuit sends the information to

the controller which in turn notifies to corresponding

maintenance department using the GSM module. A

light dependent resistor was attached close to the

street lights to detect any bulb faulty condition. The

light dependent resistor (LDR) offered a high

resistance value thereby making the circuit open. An

arm processor checks for this condition only when

the corresponding street light is switched ON. When

this condition is triggered, the arm processor sends a

message to the control room using the GSM modem

connected to the processor and thereby had a good

management system. One of the main weaknesses of

this system is being expensive.

In summary, all the previously discussed

proposed systems did not target indoor areas. Also,

they require to replace the current used lighting

system with the proposed system which takes time

and costly and thus hinder the adoption of that

system. Table 1 shows a comparison between

different fault light detection systems. The

comparison is done based on reliability, cost,

maintenance cost, lifespan, and indoor suitability.

Table 1: Comparison between different fault light

detection systems.

Reliability Cost

Maintenance

cost

Lifespan

Indoor

suitability

Rajput et al.,

(2013)

Low High High Low Low

Azura et al.,

(2013)

Moderate

High High High

Not

applicable

Saleem et

al., (2015)

Moderate

Low Low Low Low

Kuo-Hsiung

et al., (2016)

Moderate High

Low Moderate Low

Sumathi et

al., (2017)

Moderate High

Low Moderate Low

3 RFID-BASED FAULT LIGHT

DETECTION AND

IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM

In this paper, the Radio Frequency Identification

(RFID) is used for the automatic identification of

objects carrying tags based on radio-frequency

electromagnetic waves transmitted to a receiver

(reader). The proposed fault light detection and

identification system includes RFID tag, reader, and

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light sensor as shown in Figure 1. An RFID tag and

the light sensor will be fixed in the lights. When the

lights are inactive, the light sensor activates the

RFID tag to communicate with the reader through

sending ID to the faulty light. The RFID tag uses the

Tag Talk First (TTF) protocol to alert the RFID

reader that the light is not functioning. The reader

sends alerts to the backend system which locates the

faulty light based on the database. Finally, a report is

sent to the technician to fix the faulty lights.

Figure 1: Proposed light fault detection and identification

system.

4 FAULT LIGHT SYSTEM

ANALYSIS

Several antennae are connected to a single reader to

gather data from the RFID tags which makes the

proposed system economically feasible. This system

can be implemented in indoor areas such as

warehouses, airports, hospitals, stadiums, etc. Since

the RFID tag is placed indoor, the impact from

environmental factors is minimized which should

increase the lifespan of the used system. The system

also does not require changing the light bulb or the

lighting system since the RFID tag and light sensor

can be fixed inside the light case. This technique

reduces the maintenance costs. Finally, the high

durability of RFID tags reduces the required

maintenance cost and efforts.

The proposed system showed better results than

investigated systems in terms of reliability, cost,

maintenance cost, lifespan, and indoor suitability as

shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Comparison between proposed and other fault

light detection systems.

Reliability Cost

Maintenance

cost

Lifespan

Indoor

suitability

Rajput et al.,

(2013)

Low High High Low Low

Azura et al., (2013) Moderate High High High

Not

applicable

Saleem et al.,

(2015)

Moderate Low Low Low Low

Kuo-Hsiung et al.,

(2016)

Moderate High Low Moderate Low

Sumathi et al.,

(2017)

Moderate High Low Moderate Low

RFID-based fault

light detection and

identification

system

High Low Low High High

5 CONCLUSIONS

The current fault light detection systems are

investigated in this paper. The available systems did

not target indoor areas, require replacing the current

used lighting system with the proposed system, and

require time and high cost to implement. An RFID-

based fault light detection and identification system

is proposed in this paper. The proposed system

showed better results than available systems in terms

of reliability, cost, maintenance cost, lifespan, and

indoor suitability. Future work should investigate

security issues of the proposed system such as

immunity against eavesdropping, replay, man-in-

the-middle, denial of service, and RFID

counterfeiting.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank the anonymous

referees for their valuable feedback in improving

this paper. Also This research is supported by HCT

Interdisciplinary research grant.

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