ETSI releases Technical Report on requirements for smart lifts for IoT

Sophia Antipolis, 4 June 2020

To facilitate upcoming standards, the ETSI SmartM2M technical committee has released ETSI TR 103 546, a Technical Report on smart lifts, collecting and developing the type and range of data which should be exchanged between lifts and their relevant management applications. This study paves the way for technical requirements to monitor the activities and the performance of such lifts and describe their interaction with IoT devices and applications.

ETSI TR 103 546 specifies three categories of users and their role in the system: users of the lift with their needs, people and companies involved in this industry, such as manufacturers, suppliers or maintenance organizations and the owner or administrator of the buildings. Signals and controls are clearly identified, and a set of use cases highlights concrete and comprehensive examples of the usage and role of those signals and commands.

Room operators find useful information to manage and monitor a group of lifts, e.g. railway stations. As for maintenance companies and technicians, they learn how to derive a predictive maintenance programme from the available information and how a remote connection can help to fix incidents. ETSI TR 103 546 takes into account priorities such as for disabled people, to facilitate their access to a group of lifts and ease their life. And finally, you can book a lift via a smartphone app. The application allows a person to call the lift and take it to the desired floor using an application and/or voice control. The user or administrator can also receive notifications about scheduled maintenance or out of service periods.

The ETSI Technical Report outlines the complexity of the lift ecosystem, comprising both local and remote components which need to interact with one another as well as with external systems belonging to many different sectors. This leads to the conclusion that standards are key. Indeed, the whole system needs a full communication and interworking framework, able to reuse multiple communication technologies, to be interoperable, to integrate IoT devices and human interactions, and to provide semantic support and semantic interoperability.