Energy efficiency, artificial intelligence and IoT are the most discussed and updated topics within the Elevators and Escalators sector. Smart cities and smart buildings require efficiency in every building element, as well as interconnection.
Therefore, we asked Rafael Foncueva, Product Manager of MP Lift, a company specialized in smart solutions, about the role that smart elevators will play for the IoT ecosystem in order to build smart buildings and smart cities, and thanks to which technologies and solutions.
“Elevators – explains Foncueva – like other electronic or electromechanical devices designed to improve people's lives, depend on the Internet of Things. They are facilitating the creation of specific spaces and offering new functions.
The sphere of influence of the elevator includes residents of the building, technicians, owners or managers of the building and all the other people who occasionally use the service.
At the moment, the most developed services are aimed at elevator technicians, with the possibility to make use of monitoring systems with immediate alerts in case of failure, remote control and diagnostic tools, remote configuration services and even firmware updates of electronic equipment.
On the other hand, user services are less developed, although it is common to find screens in lifts offering a variety of information, as well as systems to call the lift from a mobile phone.
In the coming years, we will probably see the elevator as the core of IoT within the residential building, with the ability to provide services not only related to the elevator itself, but also to other devices in the building, such as entrance, garage, doors, air conditioning and lighting.
The connection to the entire network of elevators will provide valuable information for improving products and services, as well as establishing quality models based on comparative targets.
All these services are based on connecting the elevator to the Internet, either via the building's Ethernet network or its own communication line. In Europe, where an emergency telephone is required by legislation, the phone line of the elevator can also be used as a data channel.
Nowadays the most widely used communication technology is 4G. Nevertheless, a widespread availability of 5G, with its much greater transmission capacity, will undoubtedly enable the development of new functions or a significant improvement of the existing ones.”
The future, therefore, confirms its orientation towards modern solutions, but how is it possible to stay up to date, to be innovative, to keep offering new products and technologies in a sector with so many regulations such as the elevator industry?
We talked about this with Alessandro Cattelan, CEO of Donati S.p.A, a leading company in advanced components for elevators.
“The opportunity – explains Cattelan – arises precisely from the evolution of mandatory standards and the consequent need to develop innovative devices and solutions in order to meet the new requirements, mainly in terms of passenger and maintenance safety.
Donati is a distributor that not only selects the best offers from manufacturers, but also accompanies its customers in the choice of products and their implementation, thanks to a qualified pre-sales technical service. Our relationship with the customers allows us to better understand their needs and to continuously adapt the offer, with an ever-expanding catalogue that reached 13,000 items.”
This picture shows how companies in the sector are by nature oriented towards modernity and focused on adapting to a changing world. GEE will be an opportunity to discuss it together.
