Posted on August 5, 2019 at the Open Innovability® platform, an Enel X e-City challenge was seeking solutions to reduce the cost of maintenance of public lighting systems. Less than a year later, the awarded solution will become part of Enel X’s portfolio of services. IPTSAT, the innovative Italian SME that won the challenge, proposed a night mapping service, using the Chinese satellite "Jilin-1“, to generate data to update the street lamp census map and the status of street lamps (lights on or off) and providing useful information for operations department. 

To test the solution and jointly develop new advanced features, such as LED/HSP technology recognition and brightness correlation with population density, Enel X Innovability® engaged IPTSAT in a Technical Partnership Agreement with a Proof of Concept (PoC). This PoC focused on going beyond the state-of-the art by developing algorithms to empower accuracy and economic benefits of Satellite Imagery Analysis to address the Census of Lighting Poles in three target cities: Pescara (Italy), Móstoles (Spain) and Puente Alto (Chile). 

The goal of the project was to design machine learning algorithms and satellite imagery analysis to:

• Boost the efficiency and effectiveness of Public Lighting Census

• Safety increase, since no human operations are required on-field

• Detect relevant districts to focus upselling of new lighting poles (Low brightness in district with high-density population).

The AI & Satellite solution was fully validated on more than 100.00 lighting points during the TPA and then scaled up to more than 800.000 Lighting Points (LP), proving to be 89% faster and 75% cheaper than previous censing solution, and generating significant savings on this year e-City census costs.