Improve the management of your elevator portfolio thanks to data

Understanding the traffic data of an elevator is an underutilized metrics that can prove really useful. It can improve the general operational follow-up of the maintenance company and help it take decisions, speed up the understanding of a malfunction, improve the reliability of the machine and help the end customer in its investment decisions.

Tracking traffic is a key asset for smart and predictive maintenance.

What is traffic monitoring? There are two types of traffic monitoring metrics that help understanding the unit’s state: cabin traffic (how many times the car goes up and down, between which levels, at which pace) and doors traffic (both cabin and landing doors, closing and opening).

Accurate traffic metrics can help all stakeholders of the maintenance value chain:

■ As a field engineer or mechanic, I access to weak signals (overuse, unusable door at a specific level, etc) which allow me to anticipate a highly probable breakdown, before it occurs.

■ As an operations manager, traffic monitoring helps you monitor the impact of a repair or get a quick view of your portfolio to spot anomalies or strange patterns.

uptime’s IoT tracks door movement, cell info, the number of trips made by the cabin, its location, and of course all of its status, error codes and faults alerts. Plus, uptime offers the only truly universal technology that can work regardless of brand.

A precise knowledge of your portfolio can lead to better ops.

Thanks to traffic data and by associating it with other key metrics (status, error codes, etc), maintenance providers can act upstream, see how each unites is use, better organize the various tasks to be carried out on the elevators and better plan long work, such as modernizations.

uptime classifies 4 main kind of elevator traffic pattern:

uptime’s IoT monitors traffic conditions on hundreds of elevators, in real time. After analyzing the gathered data, our R&D team has defined typical elevator traffic patterns, by grouping the number of trips by the cabin, according to the week, day and time of day. Thanks to this, we now have a standard value for each elevator type, and we can tell if the statistics for a given elevator are very far from the standard values, using a deviation value.

They browsed the running events retrieved by our IoT device, which they grouped by hour and day of the week, over 12 weeks. We have access to average traffic information for every day of the week and every hour.

By cross-referencing the data obtained on all of our connected lifts, we obtain a typical reference traffic profile, corresponding to the use of the building. This gives us a general overview of the most common usage runs in any maintained portfolio.

Health Care buildings: “High usage” profile

We notice peaks of 120 runs per hour on average over 12 weeks, generally on Friday before noon (one every 30 seconds). The “lunch break” or morning work shift effect is clearly visible. It’s quieter on weekends.

Small residential with 2 units : “Camel” profile

We notice traffic peaks of 12 to 15 runs per hour. Residents who leave their homes in the morning, and come home in the evening, creating a traffic pattern with two “humps”.

Residential building with 4 units: “Wave” profile (late risers)

We notice traffic peaks of 10 to 12 runs per hour. Elevators are more used in the afternoon than in the morning, the pattern almost looks like a triangle. Fun fact: metrics show that 2021 Covid-19 curfew rules were respected.

High-rise residential: “half camel, half dromedary” profile

We notice peaks of 20 to 25 runs per hour, between 9:00 am and 10:00 am, and between 3:00 pm and 4:00 pm (may be related to schoolchildren returning home).

What’s at stake?

Visualizing traffic patterns for each elevator, in a whole building, a sample of buildings or even the whole portfolio is key to efficient maintenance ops.

One of our client companies was mandated to carry out the complete modernization of all the elevators in a building. They were able to study the traffic data to first modernize those that were the most used (thus the most dilapidated and obsolete) and choose the best period to carry out the work, depending on the history of use.

How companies using uptime use traffic data

The uptime controller-connected device collects more than 7,000 events per day per unit, in real time, providing our customers — independent elevator companies — never seen insights on their elevators.

■ Traffic monitoring allows us to detect a problem in real time.
■ It also makes it possible to monitor the effectiveness of some specific maintenance actions carried out by technicians and its evolution over the long term.
■ Finally, knowing the specific use profile of each building makes it possible to better organize the schedule of technician visits.

Thanks to the supervisor portal provided by uptime, maintenance managers can precisely monitor traffic data for each of their lifts and thus understand how users use it. But that’s not all of it: uptime provides elevator companies with a 360° tool covering all its needs, from predictive recommendations to act preventively on each unites to customer satisfaction with state-of-the-art transparent real-time reporting.

Learn more about our predictive recommendations >

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Originally published at https://blog.uptime.ac.