Optimissaiton and lighting design

Nowadays, the available tools for lighting design are limited in scope and inappropriate for interactive or creative use. In this paper, we present a different approach to the lighting design problem - a new methodology that includes the geometry and materials of the scene, the lighting design goals and a computational search for lighting solutions. The objective is to improve and shorten the lighting design cycle. The most common result is a set of luminaire characteristics that maximises the attainmnet of the user defined lighting goals. These goals may include different kinds of constraints or objectives. We also discuss the use of optimisation in lighting design, describe an algorithm that implements the proposed methodology and present several examples