Four floors elevator system controlled by Petri nets for didactic purposes

The aim of this paper is to describe the construction, modeling and monitoring of a four-floors small-scale elevator for didactic purpose. The prototype created has a door at each floor that opens and closes individually as real elevators and also offers an operation console with buttons to generate all the orders from/to every floor to be served by the elevator cabin. Moreover, the monitoring software has been developed in Visual C# to watch the online elevator operation and includes remote elevator commissioning. A serial connection is needed to link up the prototype to a computer. The elevators operation logic is based on the functional and technological specifications made by the designer. Petri Nets are use to model the logical specifications and they are implemented using a microcontroller PIC 16F877.