Lift Upgrading Programme - Overview

Overview

Singapore is an island country with land limited to 700 square kilometers and a population of 4 million; this population density means it is inevitable that most of its residents must live in high-rise apartments and work in high-rise commercial and industrial buildings. Elevators, escalators and moving walks have become a very important part of day-to-day life in Singapore.

The HDB started the Lift Telemonitoring System (TMS) in 1984 to monitor lifts in high-rise public housing. As at Aug 2007, more than 17,500 lifts are monitored by the system. TMS uses SCADA technology to monitor the status of the lifts in real-time from a centralized master station for events such as breakdown and trapped passengers. The lift maintenance companies are automatically notified of any problem and in most cases, repairs are carried out even before a complaint is received. The introduction of TMS has resulted in better lift performance as historical data allowed the Town Councils, who are maintaining the HDB estates, to pinpoint problem areas and improve the method of maintenance. Besides detecting problems with the lifts, TMS can also be used to carry out remote testing of lifts and other emergency standby equipment.

The HDB has begun to build more apartment buildings that are taller than 30 stories. For these buildings, existing elevator specifications such as speed, central system and hoist way equipment, will have to be improved for elevator manufacturers to design, supply and install higher speed and more sophisticated types of lifts in HDB estates to ensure better elevator ride, comfort and safety.

The Singapore government is in the process of renovating the older public housing estates. Many of these flats had lifts which only stopped at certain floors (e.g. odd/even numbered or every three floors). All lifts installed with staged landings are to be changed so they stop at all floors. The older, conventional relay controlled type would be replaced by new generation lifts with microprocessor control of elevators. It is estimated that S$5 billion would be spent on the upgrading of elevators over the next decade.