Event-driven elevator testing, control, monitoring, and maintenance

Elevators are considered as important transportation systems for urban communities. Elevators are installed with onboard controllers (circuit boards) and these controllers can generate a large volume of signals and events. In this paper, we describe an event-driven system to test, control, and monitor a large number of on board elevator controllers. The integrated system consists of a virtual controller, control and monitoring terminals, a central server, a playback function with animation, a genetic algorithm based maintenance scheduling module, and a data warehouse for managing massive real-time elevator signals. Based on the event-driven architecture, the proposed system is capable of facilitating faster deployment of new types of elevators. The system also provides engineers with playback functions for troubleshooting any hardware or software errors. In order to reduce overhead cost, the proposed system is designed to optimize resource allocation in maintenance scheduling. By deploying data warehouse technology, the proposed system allows significant reduction of storage requirement for managing real-time signals.