Control and regulation systems enhance lighting comfort and save energy – e.g. by taking account of incident daylight. They include all systems that go beyond the provision of mere on/off control. Control and regulation systems manage light, so they constitute lighting management tools.

Where lighting is operated by pressing buttons or where pre-programmed lighting scenes are retrieved, the process is known as control; where individual instructions such as "Dim now" are issued to luminaires by setpoint/actual-value comparison, it is known as regulation. A regulation system assesses a situation and arranges the response to it. It makes it possible, for example, for lighting to be regulated according to whether there are persons in the room or according to the amount of available incident daylight.