Smart Lifts Toward a Future European Standard

New technical specification provides better understanding of the aspects needed in developing an IoT system for lifts.

submitted by EFESME and SBS

In April 2020, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) published technical report (TR) 103.546 on smart lifts. It is the first document that described, by means of a series of detailed use cases, the behavior of “connected lifts” in their current state.

After the dissemination of the technical report, ETSI’s Technical Committee Smart Machine-to-Machine Communications (SmartM2M) found it appropriate to go deeper into the technical aspects related to data exchange from the lift to the outside world. This is because, today, vertical mobility, understood as everything related to lifts, platforms and, broadening the definition, escalators and moving walks, is becoming an increasingly crucial factor in data and Internet of Things (IoT) connections — for example, in smart buildings within the smart cities concept. Both of these elements use and develop around IoT and data, and it is, therefore, necessary to know and better understand how a smart lift interacts with data and the (digital) environment in which it is located.

Later, Small Business Standards (SBS), European Federation for Elevator Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (EFESME) and ETSI experts worked on the drafting of the technical specification (TS) 103.735, published in March 2021, which is a much more complete and detailed document than the precedent TR, and which allows for a better understanding of the technical aspects that need to be addressed in the development of an IoT system for lifts.

It is, therefore, necessary to know and better understand how a smart lift interacts with data and the (digital) environment in which it is located.

Starting from the use cases in the TR and going deeper into them, the experts designed a series of architectures and configurations applicable to the data exchange between lifts and IoT systems; in this process, the communication toward third-party systems (sensors, devices, external software) and data exchange platforms was included.

The work started with the basic concept that data can come from the central unit of the lift (the switchboard) and from adjacent systems. Speaking of architecture and supported configurations, a part was developed to integrate groups of lifts, thus including complex transport systems that are generally found in large buildings and are normally managed by a single switchboard.

Moreover, by creating these “open” architectures, it has been possible to apply the concepts contained in the TS not only to recently produced lifts with new technologies, but, with the addition of some devices, to also receive data from earlier generation systems, an aspect particularly important for maintenance small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs).

In the TS, a specific chapter analyzes and summarizes all the data exchanged with the outside world, i.e., signals, alarms, errors and other information related to the lift. The TS contains a series of tables that group together, according to the type of data, all the characteristics required by the system to be able to process the data itself, such as: identification and unique data to recognize the lift; geolocation; administrative data and installation characteristics; regulatory references; electrical data; and movement signals, fire alarms and signals from the two-way communication system. These are just some of the data mapped in the TS.

The documentation produced to date is intended primarily as a tool for companies that want to get in touch with these new digital systems; the use of the TS can make it easier for the world of vertical mobility to approach the creation of integrated IoT systems.

Now, the SmartM2M technical committee is thinking about the realization of a “twin” TS dealing with stairs and moving walks. Once this last work is completed (and this aspect is extremely important for the SMEs that SBS and EFESME represent), there will be the concrete possibility within ETSI and SmartM2M to move on to the development of a European standard dedicated to the world of vertical mobility, smart lifts and the IoT.