Liftes – An Expert System for Lift System Design

This paper describes an expert system, called LIFTES, which was developed to provide advice for effective lift system design in multi-storey buildings. The system’s knowledge base is structured as a set of production rules concerning physical laws and heuristics derived from documented experience on lift systems design. The inference mechanism uses forward and backward changing techniques which are selected by the user according to the problem at hand. The system is also enriched with a library that includes common analytical models from the literature on lift system design. LIFTES is expected to be a relatively inexpensive and easy to use tool for lift system design.