Elevator control project

I was going through some material from one of the most exciting projects I did during my MS at UTA...designing and implementing a complete elevator control system using a PLC. My project partner Dinesh and I, used a Programmable Logic Controller (IP 1612) to design an elevator control system for a four-story building. Optical sensors were used to detect the arrival of the elevator at different floor levels. The optical sensor had a 5-V output when the light is blocked. The conceptual testing set-up is shown below .For security reason, the third floor can not be accessed by general personnel during after hours. In the case of emergency stop, the elevator will stop at nearest floor and open the door indefinitely until an emergency stop signal is reset.

Elevator layout/diagram.

Model elevator @ ESRC-power Systems lab at UTA

Our project with all the control hardware.

The only constraint for this project was that the number of lines of ladder code was restricted to only 512. It was a challenge to have so many features of a real world elevator incorporated into our working model. We did it. Learned a lot from this live project.