Swiss elevator manufacturer Schindler has entered a partnership with Huawei on a global connected elevator solution.
Swiss elevator and escalator manufacturer Schindler runs 1.5 million elevators and escalators globally, enabling one billion elevator rides every day. Within five years, these should all be connected, following a partnership between Schindler and Huawei, which both companies presented at Huawei’s global conference Huawei Connect 2016 in Shanghai today. The goal of the connected elevator solution is to minimize interruption times and manual inspections and reduce maintenance costs by up to 50 percent. It should also provide an enhanced user experience and enable new services. “We need to transform the business in order to provide improved services and a better user experience,” said Daryoush Ziai, CEO of Schindler China.
The company has been working with Huawei in the past two years. It has already invested in products and services for remote service monitoring and is also using technology to improve the flow of people within buildings. The partnership with Huawei means Schindler will add new sensors and control system to elevators, enabling predictive maintenance, feedback that can be used to better design equipment, enhanced safety but also value added services such as targeted marketing services. “We can further improve the user experience,” said Ziai.
The solution deployed by Huawei consists of an elevator IoT gateway and edge computing elements for faster response. “If the connection to the cloud is broken, the equipment would still be running. The data collected can be stored in a gateway and transferred to the cloud when the communication is up again”, said Swift Liu, president of the enterprise network product line, products and solutions, at Huawei.
He pointed out that elevators already play an important role in people’s lives and, as more and more people live in cities, the need for high rises is due to further increase. Elevators in China account for 68 percent of the global installed base of elevators, he added. The Shanghai government has also recently passed a law requiring that all newly installed elevators in the city should include parameter monitoring technologies.