IoT and AI as a Lever for a Sustainable Public Lighting Solution with Second Life Electric Vehicle Batteries

The new era brings new concerns and challenges around the essential issue of sustainability. The current market trend around electric vehicles is a relevant step toward the end of the carbon footprint induced by the combustion engines. On the other hand, the recycling process for vehicle batteries at the end of its life cycle is and will be a new relevant concern in terms of sustainability. The purpose of this article is to discuss innovative applications for electric vehicle batteries unusable on a vehicle, in particular as public lighting, electric. The current electric vehicle battery industry produces a panoply of different battery types with distinct electronic controllers and also different interfaces, which brings also a challenge. An approach with IoT as tool for monitoring the state of the battery and an effective control of the charging and discharging process would enable its application in several low power solutions. On the other hand, managing the second life cycle of these used batteries along with solving the scalability of each charging point will be more efficient with the support of artificial intelligence (AI). Taking into consideration the efficiency and security of the process, an initial architectural approach is presented and discussed. An architecture is proposed in order to bring sustainability to the public lighting scenario with the leverage of IoT and AI technologies.