Building Lighting in the Era of Tech Integration: A Comprehensive Review

Building lighting has a significant impact on occupant health and well-being, energy efficiency, spatial perception, and visual comfort. Many current building lighting systems, however, continue to be insufficiently responsive to changing environmental conditions and human-centric demands, leading to ineffective energy use, poor visual quality, and disruption of the circadian rhythm. This disparity highlights the need for modern buildings to incorporate integrated, intelligent, and sustainable lighting design strategies. This review offers a methodical examination of current, emerging and future developments in building lighting research in six related fields within an architectural scope of building design and performance. To assess lighting effectiveness, it first examines both qualitative and quantitative performance metrics, including illuminance, luminance distribution, glare, color quality, and user comfort. Second, it examines lighting control systems that use tunable light sources that can dynamically change the spectral composition and intensity in response to task demands, occupancy patterns, and daylight availability. Third, the study examines circadian-centric lighting strategies, focusing on digital modeling and simulation approaches that capture real-world lighting conditions and biological reactions. Fourth, the function of virtual reality and sophisticated visualization tools is examined, emphasizing their role in design decision-making and pre-implementation assessment. Fifth, a critical evaluation is conducted of the expanding use of machine learning and data-driven techniques in adaptive lighting control, prediction, and optimization. Limited real-time adaptability, inadequate personalization, disjointed simulation frameworks, and poor integration of human-centric metrics with intelligent control systems are some of the major research gaps. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7, SDG 11, and SDG 3 are in line with the review, which ends with a summary of future paths toward intelligent, energy-efficient, and human-centered building lighting systems.