The TALQ Consortium has initiated a program to expand its scope on setting standards to manage other Smart City and IoT (Internet of Things) applications. Following the demand from cities, software suppliers and hardware manufacturers globally, a new Smart City Requirements Work Group was set up to extend the TALQ specification to support IoT interfaces for cities. This decision will broaden the reach of the consortium for new member companies, including those not from the lighting industry.
Today cities face many challenges on the way to becoming smart cities, including making sure they choose the right technology when developing a large variety of public services, ranging from outdoor lighting over parking and waste management to E-Mobility and many other applications. Most of these services are long-term investments and will be in use for decades. Besides trying to foster competition and negotiate the best pricing, public purchasers prefer to invest in open systems to guarantee continued access to future-proof solutions. Leading cities are increasingly looking to select interoperable solutions across their systems.
TALQ opening up for smart city solutions
In 2012, leading lighting industry players founded the TALQ Consortium to develop an interoperable interface to connect and manage heterogeneous street lighting networks from various hardware and software vendors. The first TALQ-compliant systems are expected to be certified in the second half of 2016. Now that the Outdoor Lighting Standard is nearly rolled out, the Steering Committee recently decided to broaden its scope. By defining a standard interface for smart city applications, TALQ will enable cities to have more flexibility, reduce risk and ultimately enable greater operational savings.
“We will first analyze other emerging smart city interface standards and highlight why an adoption of the TALQ Specification promises benefits to cities,” explains Gerard Lokhoff, secretary general of the TALQ Consortium. ”Our street lighting standard enables true interoperability and ensures long term flexibility for cities. Now with extending the specifications to wider smart city solutions we will make these benefits available for a much broader set of innovative applications and public services.”
Founded in 2012, the TALQ Consortium is establishing a globally accepted standard for management software interfaces to control and monitor heterogeneous outdoor lighting networks. The new TALQ interface is a specification for information exchange, suitable for implementation in various products and systems. This way interoperability between Central Management Systems (CMS) and Outdoor Lighting Networks (OLN) from different vendors will be enabled, such that a single CMS can control different OLNs in different parts of a city or region.
TALQ is an open industry consortium consisting of currently the following member companies:
Cisco Systems, Current – powered by GE, Dongguan Kingsun Optoelectronics, Harvard Engineering, Hesalight, KMW, OSRAM, Philips Lighting, Schréder, Sinapse Energia, Streetlight Vision, Telensa, UVAX Concepts, Zumtobel, Bouygues Energies et Services, CAOS Computersoftware, Cimcon Lighting, Citègestion, Citintelly, DEVTECH M2M PTE, DimOnOff, EAE Teknoloji, Future Intelligence, LED Roadway Lighting, Lucy Zodion, Lumine Lighting Solutions, Mayflower Complete Lighting Control, Petra Systems, Sensus, Silver Spring Networks, SOGEXI, Teliko, Tvilight, Valopaa.
