2nd International Conference on Electrical, Computer Engineering and Electronics (ICECEE 2015)

Design of Elevator Monitoring and Alarm System Based on WiMAX

Hong Jiang 1,a, Yongfang Shi,2,b, Lei Qi 1,c
1
The School of Software, Xinjiang University, Xinjiang Urumqi 830008,China
2
The School of Medical Engineering, Xinjiang Medical University, Xinjiang Urumqi 830011, China
a
[email protected], [email protected], c [email protected]

Keywords: WiMAX, Monitoring and alarm system, Elevator

Abstract. With rapid speed, wide bandwidth and large covered range, WiMAX is used for building
an system of elevator monitoring and alarm in this paper. The system integrates fault detection,
trapped people communication and information management to inform maintenance staff. The
design mentality and the structure of the system are detailed in the paper. The design provides a
solution for reforming elevators by internet of things.

Introduction
With the gradual advancing of China’s urbanization, the number of urban high-rise building
continues to grow. The elevator is playing an indispensable conveyance in city vertical traffic
system [1]. It is estimated that the elevator installations have exceeded 28 million in China by 2013,
and the volume continues to rise. But, as the same time, safety accident in elevator happened
frequently, which is causing wider concern in recent years. The reason is that the former manual
operational maintenance services for elevators cannot accommodate the current growing number of
aging elevators. So, it is urgent that an advanced and effective method must be adopted to safeguard
the safe operation of the elevator. Along with the rapid development of IOT (Internet of Things)
and the country’s strong support, technologies for IOT are applied to various fields more and more
widely [2]. As a typical application of IOT, elevator monitoring system can provide a more efficient
management model. By using the elevator monitoring system with IOT, the elevator accidents
could be predicted successfully and elevator failures could be repaired effectively so as to ensure
the security of lifts and reduce the accident frequency rate and losses [3].
Recently, with the determination of IEEE 802.16e and IEEE 802.16m, WiMAX can provide
transmission of video and audio signals based on IP[4], which makes up for the shortage of 3G and
WLAN. So the wireless elevator monitoring based on WiMAX can meet the requirement of the
transformation by the Internet of Thing.

Introduce of elevator monitoring alarm system

Elevator monitoring alarm system is failure judgment and warning system for elevator, which is
based on elevator detection technology. Early elevator detection system belongs to a part of elevator
running control system, which is used to improve elevator’s stability by feeding the real-time data
to control terminal. These real-time data mainly rely on sensors which are distributed in elevator to
gather various parameters of running elevator such as the weight of the lift car, the signal of portal
crane, the signal of the layer precision of the elevator, the signal of safety gear and so on. Now the
elevator detection system has gradually improved because of the need for elevator fault diagnosis.
With the application of more advanced sensors, the real time running status of elevator can be
sensed more detailedly and comprehensively. The elevator monitoring alarm system that made full
use of advanced sensing technology and combined with modern communication technology can
transfer the information from many elevators in a certain area to the monitor computer. The
compute can analyze and judge the elevator failures. The elevator maintenance staff can deal with
these failures according the feedback timely when the elevator is abnormal.

© 2015. The authors - Published by Atlantis Press 92

 WiMAX communication technology[5-6]. WiMAX(Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave
Access)) which released by IEEE(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)is a standard of
wireless broadband. Since 2001, there have been multiple releases(802.16 and 802.16m), the release
of IEEE802.16e is adopted in elevator monitoring system. The standard can provide fixed
broadband and mobile broadband access services, the effective frequency band is 2-6GHz and the
duplex work form is FDD(Frequency Division Duplexing) and TDD(Time Division Duplexing).
The accurate of invisible covers radius has reached Km level and the peak transmit rate can reach
75Mbit/s. The standard supports all-IP network-layer protocols and QoS(Quality of Service)
technology, which meets requirements completely to building wireless elevator monitoring
communication network in area.
The topology of monitoring and alarm system. Combining such advanced technologies as
embedded computer technology, WiMAX wireless communication technology, elevator fault
detection technology and IOT technology, this monitoring and alarm system join up the following
elements including the end of elevator fault monitoring, residential property, maintenance company,
local special equipment inspection institute and the computer of monitoring center to constitute the
multi-level elevator monitoring and alarm network implements centralized management of elevator.
Bu using this system, the elevator owner can real-time monitor operating condition of elevator and
maintenance company can access the operational parameters of elevator to troubleshoot remotely,
make plan and organize maintenance work. The local special equipment inspection institute can
effectively supervise the operation of elevator according to the data of maintenance and operating
conditions. The system can raise management level of elevator and the level of quality of
maintenance. The topology of monitoring and alarm system is shown in Fig.1.
The elevator monitoring and alarm system includes elevator, monitoring terminals, WiMAX
base station, local server, central server, monitoring PC and hand-held intelligent terminals, the
function of every part is described below:
The monitoring terminal that lays bottom layer of system is very important part, in which a set of
sensor is installed and typical failure reference point is set. The sensor is responsible for collecting
operational parameters of elevator. In the normal operation conditions, the elevator can be accessed
locally and remotely. But when abnormality of running elevator is raised, a warning will be
triggered automatically or manually and a transport channel of voice and video will be set up on
request. Meanwhile, the parameters of failure status are uploaded. WiMAX base station connects
local servers in small residential areas, by which many work can be carry out effectively such as
building broadband wireless network, allocating network identity for each terminal, accepting
request for network access from terminal, receiving the uploaded data from each terminal and
transiting the data to local servers. The local server is responsible for counting, collating the
parameters of each elevator in area and storing them to the database. Local and remote queries can
be allowed and the local database synchronizes with the server database of local special equipment
inspection institute on a regular schedule by internet.
Hardware constitution of monitoring and alarm terminals. The monitoring and alarm
terminals of elevator are key components of fore-end hardware in system, which include embedded
ARM computer, data collection module, wireless communication module, control module,
multimedia module and power module. The structure of elevator monitoring and alarm terminal is
shown in Fig. 2.

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 Fig.1 the Network topology of wireless elevator monitoring alarm system
Audio RFID Anternna
LCD Panel Microphon Camera SD Card Peripheral
Amplifier Module

12V5A 1Road 3Road 1Road 1Road 1Road

Switching
Power Supply LVDS USB Camera Mic Audio Intel
1G RAM ARM 6250
Power QuanzhiA20 Singlechip- WiMAX
Power Module Management Dual-core1GHz 4G NAND computer Wireless
Communication
12V7Ah 5Road 2Road 1Road 2Road Module
Lead-acid GPIO
Battery UART IIC SPI ADC

the Signal Acceleration Vibrating Weighing Safety Chain ··· the Signal of the Sensor
of the Door Sensor Sensor Sensor Detection Flat Layer Component

Fig.2 the Structure of elevator monitoring alarm terminal

The master computer. The master computer adopt industry single-board controller in which
Quanzhi A20 chip is kernel component. CPU---ARM Cortex A7---is a dual 32-bit low power
microprocessor, which onboard peripheral hardware resources include 1GB memory, 4GB NAND
Flash, 5 full duplex serial ports, 2 IIC interfaces, 1 SPI interface, 2 10-bit ADC conversion
interfaces and multi common I/O interfaces for connecting various sensors and wireless
communication module.
Collection module. The collection module is composed of multiple sensors allocated in all parts
of elevator. It should be noted that the sensors are independent of the elevator control system and
mainly used for collecting operational parameters of key components of elevators in real time. The
kinds of these sensors include accelerometer, load cell, vibration sensor, leveling sensor and door
motor sensor, which are connected to monitoring and alarm terminals by signal cable.
Multimedia module. The multimedia module consists of 14-inch LCD, audio power amplifier,
loudspeaker, electret microphone and camera. When the elevator is normally running, multimedia
can play propaganda about taking lift-related knowledge or multi-media advertisement. The cost of
operation and maintenance of system can be offset by advertisement revenue. When the elevators
have faults, the multimedia module by which the audio and video signals inside the elevator are
collected and transferred can be used as a rescuing and alarm virtual phone for trapped persons.

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 Power module. The power module is consisted of the main power and backup power. The main
power is a switching power supply whose input and output is AC150-220V and DC12V5A
respectively. The backup power is an uninterrupted power supply which is composed of 12V7AH
lead-acid batteries and charge and discharge managing circuit for guaranteeing continued
operating for at least one hour after power-off.
Communication module. The communications network of elevator monitoring and alarm
system is built using WiMAX wireless broadband technologies. The communication module is
realized by Intel Centrino Advanced-N + WiMAX6250 wireless card conforming IEEE802.16e
Wave2 protocol. Some basic parameters of card are described as: 3.5G working frequency band,
6Mbps uplink bandwidth, 20Mbps downlink bandwidth, Mini PCIe half-high design and USB 2.0
communication port. Intel provides official drivers of Linux and Windows.
I/O module of radio frequency identification (RFID). The operations people and managers of
elevator are equipped identification card which are using for recording the log about the start and
end time of maintenance works, identity data of operations staff. This module adopts RFID
technology and use Mingtai MRF-35-MEM as the contactless IC card reader. The type of reading
and writing IC card meets the criteria of MIFARE, the frequency of reading and writing is
13.56MHz, communication interface is RS232, communication frequency is 115200bps.
WiMAX wireless network building. The IEEE802.16 standard designates two standard
networking modes: PMP(point-to-multi-point) and Mesh[7]. Because the requirement of coverage
radius of base station is not big, the amount of network terminal is small and the type of terminal is
fixed, PMP mode is adopted. The complete network architecture of WiMAX is composed of core
network, base station, user base station, radio relays and user terminal equipment. In the application
environment of this system, the requirement of coverage radius of signals is about 1 km, which is
far lower than the standard --50km.

The system software

The system software includes two parts: terminal software and monitoring computer software,
programming are used OS (operating system) +APP (application) mode, the terminal of OS using
the Linux operating system to remove the graphical interface, the APP software based on the cross
platform C++ application framework QT development. The monitoring uses Windows 8 and the
APP is developed by Delphi based on Windows visual programming environment.
The terminal application program. According to the actual function, the terminal application
program can be divided into four main modules: acquisition and processing, communication, event
judgment processing and multimedia play.
Data acquisition module mainly collects running status parameters for the elevator. In order to
ensure the reliability and real-time of data transmission, data transmission uses the TCP protocol,
and the design of video data uses the UDP on the audio transmission based on RTCP protocol. The
event judgment processing mainly analyzes sensor data and compares to the normal parameters.
According to the data types, if fault type is determined it will trigger the alarm and upload the fault
parameters, in addition to accept the execution of remote access and command parsing. Multimedia
playing module is responsible for audio, video file decoding and playing.
The monitoring computer application. According to the function, the monitoring computer
applications can be divided into communication, data processing, transaction processing,
man-machine interface of four modules.
Communication module includes four parts: 1, receiving terminal data package uploaded through
TCP protocol, sending instruction to realize communication between the remote monitoring
computer and terminal interaction. 2, through the RTCP protocol to receive video telephone
terminal data flow, and publish the update advertisement file. 3, If emergency is happened, expert
consultation can be established to realize multi voice communication through IP phone. 4, the
necessary elevator status can be sent to rescue or maintenance personnel mobile phone via text
message.

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Conclusions
(1) WiMAX, as a metropolitan area network technology based on open standards, can provide
wireless broadband connections in the wider geographical range compared with the WIFI
technology.
(2) There is nothing comparable to this advantage in the non visible distance up to the Km range
for requirement to establish the high bandwidth of the wireless local area network with wireless
occasions.
(3) The technology to build the alarm system is more convenient for installation layout,
flexibility and maintainability.
(4) It provides a solution for the present stage of IOT transformation to use elevators aging in
later life.

Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by:
[1] Major Project of Autonomous Regions Colleges Scientific Research Plan in
Xinjiang[XJEDU2014I007]
[2] The Joint Project of School and University of Xinjiang [201204361319]

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