Elevator Monitoring System to Guide User’s Behavior by Visualizing the State of Crowdedness

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) is expected to make our social life more convenient. In the IoT, various lifestyle tools measure the surrounding situation using sensors that send the data to a cloud. The cloud analyzes a set of the data, visualizes it and/or sends feedback to the “things.” However, there are many old facilities around us that were established in the past and do not have a sensing mechanism or the ability to send data, and so they become isolated from the concept of IoT. In this paper, we show that using an elevator for an example, even old equipment can be made efficient using IoT. We propose an IoT system that improves the fairness and efficiency by visualizing the crowdedness of an elevator, which has only one cage. When a certain floor gets crowded, unfairness arises in the users on the other floors as they are not able to take the elevator. Our proposed system improves the fairness and efficiency by guiding the user’s behavior. The edge device collects information such as the existence and the destination floor of users using beacon technologies. The cloud predicts the crowdedness based on the data transferred by MQTT. Additionally, this system does not require the elevator to have connectivity to the internet. Further, the simulation results of the effect of the proposed system are shown.