The TALQ Consortium, Piscataway, N.J., made a significant step towards the official rollout of the TALQ Certification Program for interfaces to manage outdoor lighting networks. During the first TALQ “Plug Fest” held two weeks ago in Valencia, Spain, developers successfully applied the consortium’s new Test Tool with various control technology implementations. The tool is to be used to test outdoor lighting products for TALQ-compliance. Several central management and TALQ bridge systems were also tested for compatibility against each other, a TALQ release said. The results confirm that the test procedures are nearly ready for the launch of the Certification Program.
The TALQ Consortium, an open initiative composed of leading lighting industry players, is working on setting a global standard for the interface to control and monitor diverse outdoor lighting networks (OLNs), said street lighting control is an “important factor for cities and communities on their way to becoming a ‘Smart City’.”
In 2012 the members started to develop the TALQ Specification which focuses on the application layer of the interface protocol, allowing maximum freedom for manufacturers to develop optimized solutions within an interoperable framework. The TALQ Interface is built on standard internet protocols and security standards, such as XML/HTTP and Transport Layer Security, and is independent of connectivity technology.
In the first week of December this year, the group was able to test each product against other systems. “On the final day we saw one central management system successfully controlling two other TALQ bridge products concurrently, all from different manufacturers,” said Dr Nick Hewish, test tool development supervisor of the TALQ Certification Workgroup. “We identified a number of issues where the specification must still be updated slightly and where the test tool did not yet cover a wide enough range of options. These were things we could not have discovered without bringing together a range of implementations.”
