Elevint: A Cloud-based Internet of Elevators

Abstract

With the significant growth of the number of highrise buildings nowadays, the dependence on elevators has also increased. The issue that faces elevator passengers in case of breakdowns is the long waiting time for the arrival of the maintenance engineers to perform the repair, as the process of reporting is done manually. The safety concern increases when people are trapped. Most state-of-the-art approaches detect faults without providing means to facilitate the communication between elevator owners, maintenance companies, and engineers or notify them in case of breakdowns. Moreover, none of the proposed fault detection solutions rely on rules specified by experts in the field. This paper aims at addressing these issues by proposing a system that manages, monitors, detects faults and informs users of any faults instantly by sending notifications. Specifically, the paper proposes a mobile application, Elevint, that is, cloud-based and exploits the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Elevint provides real-time monitoring of elevator operating conditions collected from sensors. The data is then transferred to the cloud, where faults are detected by applying rules that compare the current conditions with severity levels determined by experts. In the case that a fault is detected, elevator owners and maintenance companies are automatically notified. Moreover, through Elevint, maintenance companies can assign engineers to repair the fault and elevator owners can view and re-schedule the engineer's visit if needed. Testing our system on an elevator model shows 98% accuracy. In future, we intend to test it on real elevators to verify its applicability in practice.