Calculation Engine Scheduling
A traditional desktop street lighting design application will perform a single set of calculations for a single luminaire with one road and luminaire configuration. However, the ACE engine will calculate the results for many different luminaires, across a multitude of road, column/pole and luminaire configurations, which could be many thousands, or millions of calculations.
The calculation time required to complete a single scenario may be less than a second, but calculating millions of scenarios may take, hours, or even days, if a very large scenario is defined.
In order to deliver results quickly, and handle the calculation requirements of multiple clients, ACE uses calculation engines hosted on multiple Cloud Computers.
Large scenarios will be split into smaller work packages and, through the use of a Scheduler/Virtual Machine Manager, the number of running ACE engines can increased, or decreased, automatically to match the calculation demand and the user’s required return schedule. Each ACE Engine is allocated a complete scenario, or a subset of a scenario, which it then works through, delivering results to the central datastore.
The Virtual Machine Manager continually monitors the health and progress of the ACE Engines and, in the event of problems, can reschedule work to alternative ACE Engines. ACE Engines are only active when there is workload to process, and can be dynamically created/shutdown as required. This ensures the costs associated with ACE calculations are minimized compared to having dedicated computers constantly running with no allocated workload.
Resource Saving
Working with a traditional desktop lighting design application, such as Lighting Reality PRO, it is possible to use saved configurations and generate results manually, but this requires a lot of user interaction to set up the individual calculations and then extract and tabulate the results. Using traditional methods a single user may process typically 150 configurations per day. In the same time, ACE could process millions of configurations! Furthermore, ACE consistently saves the correct data without the scope for human error. With increasingly complex tender requirements, plus the widening scope for customizing luminaires with different LED configurations, it now requires the ability to test and assess a far wider product range than ever before.