One of the elevation systems most appreciated in the world is certainly that of the escalators. They become essential in all the biggest structures such as airports, hospitals, and shopping centers, where thousands of people flock daily. From the first prototype, built in 1859 by Nathan Ames, so many gains are made, finally obtaining state-of-the-art systems. These implants provide design, maintenance, and installation to guarantee high performance and security during their cycle of life.
In the URBANAGE project, which takes care to improve the lives of old people, through innovative technologies, the escalators are taken into account, being one of the city infrastructures that can facilitate mobility of older adults. During the project, a simulator of incidents on escalators has been developed. The component generates fictitious malfunctions on public escalators, which related information (e.g. location) are
retrieved form the City Information Model (CIM) components. This information (data about the escalators and their related incidents) are managed though the Context Broker, so enabling the possibility to leverage real-time notifications for third applications (e.g. the Age Friendly Route Planner).
This component aims to support the municipalities to investigate and understand potential
malfunctions on these kind of infrastructures and how they affect mobility, as well as what
functionalities or data would be useful and what information related to malfunctions should be monitored, also with the future perspective of implementing a real system to manage these problems.
The generator of incidents on escalators creates a chronology of malfunctions, reading and
updating the status of the escalator. Particularly, it permits setting an escalator from working
status to broken and, at the same time, creating the corresponding entity "incident", which will follow its own life cycle (e.g. new, under maintenance, solved, etc.).
From the collection of the generated data, it is possible to evaluate usefulness of different
functionalities related to the management of escalators and the planning of investments (e.g. real time alerts, programmed maintenance, identification of contingency plans, etc.).
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