KONE’s Amit Gossain explains why elevators are more complex than automobiles

Elevators are inscrutable devices that are essential to life in any modern metropolis. The primary concern for elevators is that they have to be safe, as a number of people are suspended in a tight space in a vertical shaft. The complexities of the elevator begin right with the down and up buttons, which continues to befuddle people who cannot decide if the down button is for going down or for calling the elevator down (it is the former).

Today’s modern and sophisticated elevators are getting increasingly smart, reducing the workload of maintenance workers, while enhancing the safety offered. Right now, both the Internet of Things and Cloud technologies are being used to continuously monitor elevators, and ensure that the servicing technicians are alerted and are aware of any potential problems even before they develop. The technology is expected to get increasingly smarter and more sophisticated in the future, with the integration of artificial intelligence as well.

With the use of music and information, there are efforts to transform elevator rides into experiences which uplift your mood as well. We spoke to the managing director of KONE India to dive into the technologies used in elevators. We first wanted to start with a primer on KONE and its operations in India.

Gossain tells us, “In our case, in KONE, we are about a 110 year old company headquartered in Helsinki, Finland. It is a Finnish company. Its stocks are held at the Helsinki stock exchange, publicly listed.

We are in 140 countries either directly or through our distributors. In India, we have close to around 5,500 people. We additionally have 2,500 subcontractors, also trained by us.

Lot of them are in our family business. The father was working with us as a subcontractor, now the son is doing the same job. We have a very high customer loyalty index, which is our focus.

We also focus a lot on employee wellbeing, nice offices, employee health, and also their happiness. So these are some of the things from KONE in India, from India we also look after Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. Elevators can potentially power up buildings We then wanted to better understand how exactly an elevator works, and the technologies used in a modern elevator.

Gossain tells us, “One of the things that a lot of people think is that the elevator is a very simple thing, it is just a box which goes up and down. But, it is actually a lot more complicated and some of our people in the industry say it is more complicated than an automobile. Of course, elevators don’t have engines, they have a battery, but even if they had engines, elevators have a lot of technologies.

” Elevators are being increasingly integrated with technologies, but considering the safety concerns, the tech has to be reliable and rock solid. Gossain tells us, “When you look at an elevator on its own, it is actually a box. But if you look at what is inside the elevator, you see a lot of buttons, you see a cable, you see a torque converter.

There are elevators which have a machine room, as well as elevators which don’t have a machine room, the machine is actually inside the elevator. Then there are bearings and a lot of other things, and there is a hoisting technology. So technically, it actually has a lot of components.

A lot of electronics are also packed into an elevator. ” Gravity batteries store gravitational energy for later use by lifting heavy blocks to great heights, when excess power is being generated by say a wind farm or hydroelectricity projects. Lowering the blocks can be used to convert the stored gravitational energy into electricity.

The same concept is also being used in elevators. Gossain explains, “A very simple mechanism is a pulley, you pull from one side and the other side goes up. It is actually a similar technology, but the only difference is that now you have got a lot of IoT happening inside of an elevator, then you have got a lot of very precise electronics components inside an elevator to make it move up and down.

An elevator today, with the power that it generates with its movement, has a regenerative drive. So that itself generates power for the elevator to move up and down. So the movement of the elevator generates energy.

Therefore now, the next step is for people to check if the elevator can produce enough electricity through its movement for the building. So that’s sustainability, so that’s the next step. ” How elevators leverage the Internet of Things and Cloud Services We next dove into the rabbit hole, or the elevator shaft, to better understand the nitty-gritties of the sophisticated tech used in elevators.

Gossain tells us, “What currently is being done is IoT is playing a big role, and cloud technologies. So we have monitoring centres for 24×7 connected services. So we have a box that we put in the elevator that connects to the cloud, and it sends a signal through the machine that ‘look, I am running fine, or I am going to have a problem, my bearing is going to leak or there are going to be certain problems’.

It sends the signal even before it fails. So it is preventive or predictive maintenance. Even before it fails, our monitoring system shows that there is something going to go wrong.

Our service engineer or technician goes and fixes it. So in a nutshell, an elevator doesn’t fail. So some of our customers may ask why are you charging an annual maintenance contract (AMC) if the elevator doesn’t fail.

It doesn’t fail because it has got 24×7 services. ” Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to play a more important role in diagnostics going forward. Gossain explains, “Elevators have music, lights, all that is good, but the most important factor in an elevator is the safety for people to move up and down, so that is our key focus as well.

We want to keep our people safe, and therefore this IoT is important. That’s where artificial intelligence comes in. We can also replicate or simulate the complete process an elevator goes through in why certain things happen, and it can be used to protect from those certain things in the future.

Right now, we are only at predictive maintenance, we know that this thing is going to fail and we go and solve. AI will be one step further, it will also predict when the prediction is going to happen. ” AI can further streamline the maintenance process, and give feedback to guide design decisions for future elevators.

Gossain tells us, “IoT predicts failure is going to happen, it predicts the bearing is going to go wrong. With AI, the bearing that was going to go wrong will send a lot of data, and it will tell our manufacturing teams to set that right, or our specialised teams to do something different, so that what IoT has predicted is going to happen does not happen in the future. Which means, it will be ten times better.

So we are hearing a lot about these deepfakes, that is the cons of AI, but the pros are a lot. What it is actually doing is replicating things. Here it replicates the whole scenario, simulates it, and then tells you how you can actually have a foolproof system.

” The development and testing process for elevators We then explored the process by which new elevator designs are developed and tested. Gossain told us, “Whenever we launch a new elevator or a new design, we have a very rigorous way of designing. At our Chennai technology centre we have about 1,500 people who continuously work on software development, but also on hardware.

We have a lot of testing centres for each component. Everything is tested. When an elevator is produced, it goes through a test tower.

We don’t just sell it, we test that elevator or an escalator for at least six months, and keep improving it, till we are 100 per cent convinced that it is safe and of good quality. So we do it in the test tower. We have a new, state-of-the-art test tower.

Within the test tower, you can go to the top floor and there is a conference room. We also have a customer experience centre, where we can bring in customers and show them how it is being tested. So once that is tested, we have pilot runs.

” KONE has recently started manufacturing escalators in India. Gossain tells us, “Currently, we just launched the local manufacturing of escalators in India. We used to import escalators.

We are manufacturing elevators for the last 40 years now, but escalators we imported. Now we have started manufacturing, which is being tested. It will then go through pilot customers, then we will be launching in the market.

So, it has to be a very rigorous, fool-proof system, at least from our side. There are a lot of local manufacturers who may not follow this whole rhythm and whole process. That is how we make it foolproof.

” Just like everything else in the world, elevators are benefitting from getting increasingly connected. Gossain explains, “We were the first ones to have digitally connected elevators in the world. We launched it roughly around two or three years ago.

Now that has got inbuilt 24×7 connected services. It actually sends signals to the cloud, from the cloud to the machine, and if there are any problems that are going to happen, it predicts that and then the machine sorts it out. In India, we have two monitoring centres.

We have a monitoring centre in Chennai and in Pune. A message comes to the engineer or the people who are monitoring that there is something going to go wrong in an elevator. Immediately they can login and see it on a big screen where the problem is going to occur.

They send that message through our call centres to the service engineer. The nearest service engineer goes and fixes it. ” Yep, KONE is addressing just how boring elevators are People do not generally have positive relations with elevators, because elevators always makes you wait, exposes you to awkward interactions with strangers in tight spaces, and keep making you wonder what it will do next or where it decides to go.

Also, there is no getting around the fact that elevators are boring. If the power gets suddenly cut off, the elevators can make a long, slow descent to the basement floors. While there are a whole bunch of safety mechanisms to ensure elevators cannot crash down the shaft, there is the scary possibility of being trapped within elevators.

We asked what happens in such cases, and discovered that technology plays a role there as well. Gossain tells us, “It also helps in entrapment. This is rare, but in case you are entrapped within an elevator, you will not be stuck for hours together, within twenty minutes a skilled person will arrive, wherever the elevator is.

AI we still have a lot of work to do from a customer point of view. From a factory, manufacturing, and the interface, it is being done nicely. But, from a customer point of view, this failure that the IoT has predicted, that data could be collected, and that data would be processed saying these are the improvements that you need to do in the future, either in maintenance or installation or manufacturing.

” And then the company is tackling the boringness of elevators head on, as well as addressing safety concerns and the need for contactless interfaces that cropped up during the pandemic. Gossain explains, “When you go to some of the highrise buildings today, they try to make it interesting. You either have some news, or you have temperature, we also have music and lights.

The other thing you can do is you can call the elevator through the phone if you want. The other thing is you can have a QR code and you can scan it. Then there is destination control.

When you see people standing in a queue, the elevator says 1-8 floor, this queue, 9-16, this queue. Now, you don’t have to do that, you just scan your card, and you are allocated an elevator. All eight elevators are working, it does not say this for this and this for this.

Wherever the majority of the people are going to go, it puts them in one group, and does the grouping of various people. Which means the movement is at least five times faster. Wherever there is the destination control system, the queue is very short, even in cities like Mumbai.

So, same number of elevators, but the elevators can do a much better people movement job, which is our job, our job is to make people flow smoothly. ” Elevators and the need for speed One way to improve experiences in elevators is to just make the rides shorter, and the elevators faster. Being smart enough to manage the movement of people actually allows the elevator more flexibility when it comes to speeds.

Gossain tells us, “If you have to go to a very high floor, we used to have elevators going only three to four metres a second, in India. Overseas, you had fast elevators. Now, you have very fast elevators.

The speed of the elevator can actually adjust based on the number of floors, and the number of people inside. If there are four people going only to the twenty first floor, and it is not going to stop, it goes very fast. Otherwise, it can go slow because it has to keep stopping.

So, the speed can vary. From a KONE perspective, in India, we have the fastest elevator, eight metres per second. ” We then wanted to better understand the footprint in India and about their installations.

Gossain told us, “In all four regions, north, south, east, west, the tallest towers all have KONE. 70 per cent of the Mumbai skyline has got KONE. There are different speeds there, depending on the requirement and the height of the building and the number of people that have to be moved.

Now, the higher the speed, the higher the cost of the elevator. Sometimes, you have lesser shafts, and fewer elevators, so therefore they need to move much faster. It occupies less space in the building, but does the same job.

You can have two slow moving elevators, or one very fast moving elevator, which can take care of the building. The cost of the elevator could still be the same, because the slow moving and the fast moving could be very different in price. ” Our final question was about how India is different as a market, and the modifications or adaptations necessary for local elevators.

Gossain explained, “We have the largest elevator factory in south and southeast Asia in Chennai. We are continuously innovating, and also bringing global technologies to India, trying to change some of the things and then indigenising them for local use. When you have 13 passengers written on an elevator, in India you might get 17 in.

So we need to make it more robust, so that is what we do. Sometimes we have 15 people get in, and the elevator still keeps moving. In some parts of the world, it might stop.

Those are a few things that we have to modify. ”.