In all lighting sectors, warranty and customisation are becoming key product differentiators. In addition to that, the integration of more electronics and sensors in lighting systems will change what we call lighting today. While the concepts of digitalisation and Industry 4.0 are progressing fast into the manufacturing world, in the lighting industry, the front-end product design is still using traditional simulation techniques. An innovative approach is to couple digital twins with Artificial Intelligence to offer unlimited possibilities to the “first build and then tweak” approach. The main goal of AI-TWILIGHT is to merge the virtual and physical worlds to pave the way for innovations in fields where the European lighting industry is likely to be competitive. Self-leaning digital twins of lighting systems (LED source, driver of a lighting application) will be created and used as input for predicting performance and lifetime of product and infrastructure design and management in an autonomous world. Tests will be carried out in selected application domains e.g. automotive, horticulture, general and street lighting. The key technical and exploitation objectives of the AI-TWILIGHT consortium are: • To create and digital twins of LED light-sources and electronics (driver) • To create self-learning models using AI and analytics techniques • To facilitate the implementation of the digital twins in digitalized design flow (for SSL product design) and facilitate their applications upstream, up to digital twins of lighting systems of large infrastructures (e.g. for building design). • To implement the AI-TWILIGHT methods, models and tools within consortium partners to harvest its benefits When translated to business goals, objectives will result in the introduction of more customised and connected products by 20% while reducing the time to market by 30%, and reducing by 25% the total cost of ownership of a “AI-TWILIGHT powered system.

The target of this project is to prepare and train future engineers for the design challenges and opportunities provided by modern optics technology. Such challenges include lossless photon management, modelling at the system, components and feature level, and the link between design and technology. Today all optical designs are often perceived following different approaches, namely geometrical optics, physical optics and nano-photonics. Traditionally these approaches are linked to the different lengths-scale that are important to the system. Starting from the entire system that is macroscopic and uses geometrical optics, over the miniaturized unit that is based on micro-optics and needs physical optics design, down to the active nano-photonics entity that allows steering light truly at the nano-scale but which requires to be designed with rigorous methods that provide full wave solutions to the governing Maxwell’s equations. A design for manufacture of next generation optical applications necessarily requires to bridge the gap between the different length scales and to consider the design at a holistic level. At the core are optical simulation models developed and used in the academic research and the one used for optical designs in industry. Up to now, only the academic partners apply an integral approach to include micro- and nano-photonics in their simulations. Together with the industrial partners projects will be launched to promote the academic developments in optical design and simulation over different length scales towards the industry. The industry will use the know-how to consolidate their expertise, expand their businesses, and occupy new fields of activities. For each research subject, may it be nano-photonics, micro-optics or system engineering, a channel can be provided to access particular knowledge and/or stimulate collaborations.