Elevators and escalators surround our daily lives. Whether it is moving around the office building, or shopping in a mall or even getting from point A to point B while travelling through the city, lifts and escalators have become a major part of our environment today.
IBM’s Watson IoT platform is being used by KONE, one of the world leaders in elevators and escalators for quite a few years now. This platform helps the maintenance provider to properly analyse customer feedback and data and plans actions accordingly. With time and technologies advancing, smart is getting smarter day after day. Which was one of top class elevators 10 years ago might fall short on qualities when compared to a modern day elevator. With operational maintenance installed, a
modern day elevator processes its own data and generates solutions and related operational patterns based on IoT and artificial intelligence.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) can be developed within an integrated ecosystem to secure seamless functioning. KONE has developed most of its APIs in the public domain in order to facilitate both partners and developers while implementation of a specific system. E.g, there are building operators who have developed applications for a tablet to work as a virtual receptionist in case the host is not home. This application will detect the guest activity and a lift will be remotely called down to take them to the required floor.
Predictive maintenance is one of the key technologies that are driving the growth of the smart elevators and escalator industry. Maintenance of lifts and escalators can be very strenuous at times which makes the implementation of IoT and AI a problem solver for the industry. Predictive maintenance helps operators to monitor hardware actions in lifts and escalators and prevent them from future malfunctions. On the other hand, in case of an emergency service, the technicians will have a clear idea as to what they are dealing with. They will have full knowledge of the problem much before making any physical repair.
The elevator industry is getting smarter and smarter with IoT and AI implementations and forming a database for itself. A database where every all the information about operational maintenance of the machines is stored in the cloud which is put to analysis to decide future plans of action.
