Commercial, industrial, and mass transit and residential property owners are faced with daily challenges concerning the reliable operation of vertical transportation equipment. Escalators, elevators, and moving walkways carousels, and revolving doors must reliably function to allow movement of people and supplies. The unexpected failure of any vertical transportation equipment results in immediate inconvenience and in higher repair costs to the owner. Moreover, when an equipment failure involves vertical transportation equipment, passengers and personal property on or near the equipment may be injured or damaged. Injuries and alleged injuries may result in lawsuits against the owner, maintenance personnel, and the equipment manufacturer. For all these reasons, accurate and reliable concerning the operational status of vertical transportation equipment before, during, and after any failure is critical.
Most manufacturers of vertical transportation equipment incorporate electrical circuitry such as sensors and alarms which can detect an equipment failure and dictate an immediate, if limited, response. For example, modem elevators utilize light and pressure sensors to ensure that doors do not shut if a passenger or an item is blocking the doors. Modem escalators incorporate handrail speed sensors which stop the escalator if a passenger misuses the handrail (such as by sitting on the handrail) while the escalator is in motion. Such known safety devices serve a valuable purpose, but their usefulness is limited, and can be significantly expanded by capturing and managing additional data related to the triggering of the device. For example, if a sensor on an escalator stops because of excessive handrail pressure, it would be helpful to know, for example: whether the escalator stopped abruptly, or whether it decelerated slowly; whether it started up again immediately, or whether there was a significant delay; whether the cause of the fault was a heavy package on the handrail, or whether the cause was a person sitting on the handrail; whether the person or package fell when the escalator stopped; whether there were any other passengers on the escalator, and if so, how many; and whether any of passengers fell when the escalator stopped or re-started. Known monitoring systems for escalators, elevators, moving walkways, and carousels do not address these needs.
Additionally, owners and maintenance personnel have been known to disconnect or mechanically override manufacturer's safety devices on all types of vertical transportation equipment. For example, modem escalators have comb impact devices which are designed to shut down the escalator when a pressure exceeding a pre-determined level is detected. In high-traffic environments such as public transit facilities, owners and maintenance personnel have been known to secretly override the comb impact safety devices in order to allow heavier traffic loads and to avoid frequent nuisance shutdowns. If the equipment suffers a failure that requires investigation, the owner or maintenance personnel can easily and undetectably remove the bolts, destroying evidence of the override and leaving the manufacturer responsible to explain why the safety devices did not function as designed. All too often, the owner or manufacturer is left with inadequate information to explain the failure, and therefore liable to an injured party or to the owner of the equipment for damages incurred. For these reasons, there exists a continuing need for accurate and reliable data capture concerning all failures, faults, and alarms triggered on transportation equipment.
Many municipal transit facilities, as well as public and private properties which require mass movement of people and personal property, utilize several different types and brands of transportation equipment such as elevators, escalators, moving walkways, carousels, revolving doors, and automated doors. Such facilities present significant challenges in the form of monitoring and maintenance. Many public authorities have difficulty determining whether their transportation equipment is even running or not at any given time. Often, the only sources of reports of equipment problems are complaints from the public, or the occasional report from a station manager or other employee. Such monitoring is entirely reactive in nature, and creates a dangerous environment for passengers and a frustrating and cumbersome environment for the property owner and maintenance personnel, whether maintenance is outsourced or performed in house.
Preventive maintenance is difficult, at best, in the vertical transportation equipment industry. Taking an escalator out of service during rush hour is a major undertaking that is often avoided or delayed for as long as possible. On the other hand, repairing or maintaining equipment during business hours can reduce overtime costs for maintenance. Because of this dichotomy, planned repairs and maintenance tasks are often deferred, if unintentionally. Unfortunately, preventive maintenance cannot always be deferred successfully. Mechanical equipment demands service, and will eventually fail if service is not performed. However, routine and scheduled maintenance alone does nothing to resolve the problem of monitoring the equipment and passengers and property on the equipment and to preserve evidence of sudden failure, real or fraudulent personal injury and property damage, security breaches, or other events having potential legal significance to the owner.
In sum, liability, access, and system availability must be monitored and managed for any property owner to survive and thrive in today's fast-paced industries. Understanding these issues, the invention herein is designed not only to provide improved systems and methods for monitoring of new and existing elevators, escalators, and other vertical transportation equipment, but also to manage the information produced by such monitoring.
The invention described herein accomplishes the following objects:
Key Alarm Objects: Obtaining equipment fault and alarm information is important in managing and maintaining any transportation equipment system, and is particularly important for escalators and elevators. Alarm information gathered by the present invention comprises: 1) Providing out of service notification and alarms through various means, such as pagers, cell phones, and printers, for example; 2) Providing information as to how long the equipment was out of service; 3) Preserving information as to date and time a mechanic or contractor was notified; 4) Providing information as to when the equipment was returned to service; 5) Determining which equipment fault or alarm shut the equipment down; 6) Determining what was happening to the equipment when the fault or alarm occurred; 7) Recording and storing reliable records of all information relevant to the fault or alarm and its cause; 8) Automatically dispatching maintenance personnel through the use of electronic work orders that contain detailed information concerning the cause of the service interruption; and 9) Capturing video images for a predetermined time before, during, and after an alarm or fault.
Objects for Analysis, Repair, and Preventive Maintenance: While alarm information is valuable, it is only part of the system and method required to effectively manage building transportation equipment information and issues. Therefore, in order to manage preventative maintenance for building transportation equipment such as elevators, escalators, moving walkways, carousels, and automated doors the following objects apply: 1) enabling creation of a preventive maintenance program designed for a specific elevator or escalator system based upon requirements of the system in conjunction with data captured during in-service operation of the equipment; 2) updating the preventive maintenance program and schedule to reflect actual needs as determined by data captured during in-service operation of the equipment; 3) verifying that preventive maintenance is being performed; 4) managing and monitoring the activities of third parties such as contractors, maintenance personnel, and inspectors; 5) managing maintenance, repair, and testing efforts by owner's own personnel; 6) maintaining and managing records as up to date, complete, accurate, and timely; 7) reducing human error or mischief in the entry and preservation of equipment information; 8) reducing subjectivity in the preventive maintenance process, including making of records and determination of priority among equipment and tasks; 9) optimizing the performance requirements for preventive maintenance; 10) preserving and presenting accurate information and evidence relating to the availability and use of the equipment; and, 11) preserving accurate information and evidence to allow reliable reports and responses to owner and third parties when questioned on a specific incident or trend.