Intellevator: An Intelligent Elevator System Proactive in Traffic Control for Time-Efficiency Improvement

Elevator functioning as a vertical transport facility remains stand-alone and incapable of accessing the fine-grained traffic information. It significantly restricts the flexibility and efficiency of vertical transporting. In particular, while in peak-time, the limited elevator physical capacity with the momentary traffic increment gives rise to the vertical traffic bottleneck problem in large-scale buildings. The problem further results in the long waiting, dissatisfaction, frustration of passengers. In this paper, we present our proposal named Intellevator: an intelligent elevator system that enables the passively functioning elevator system be proactive and intelligent in traffic control for optimizing the transport efficiency. The proposal is an end-to-end architecture that composed of three aspects: Internet of things (IoT)-enabling technology on a conventional elevator; an agent server to enhance elevator computational capability and a novel user interface for delivering system intelligence to end-users. The proposal was experimented on a conventional elevator in a built smart-building environment. Numerical simulation results have demonstrated the system efficiency improvement. In addition, the system usability and user experience have been evaluated by a user study as well.