ASAP

Have you ever think of what will happen when the city population start to grow faster than the technologies it depends on? With this article today we want to present you the solution, which is a result of Microsoft and ThyssenKrupp Elevator cooperation.

Some facts for the development of the modern cities:

• It is expected that the world city population will grow with more than 3 billion during the next 30 years and thus the number of citizens will be above 7 billion – this is almost as much as is the whole world population today.
• The biggest growth will be in India, China and Nigeria, where around 1 billion will leave the villages to move to cities.
• The city population in the already crowded big cities of the Western hemisphere will still continue to increase.
• The megacities with population over 10 million, will increase from 28 in 2014 to 41 till 2030.
• One billion people everyday use 12 million elevators, which turns the elevation transport the wide-spread way of transportation.

The fast grow of the city leads to challenges how to make everything possible so that the cities, buildings and business can continue its normal functioning. And this is exactly the main goal of ThyssenKrupp Elevator (TKE). Thanks to the proactive services and solutions for elevators and buildings, which they develop, they already have a solution -– MAX. MAX widens the existing possibilities for remote monitoring, in order to decrease half the time spent for repairing of the existing elevators.

The elevator industry is almost 150 years old, and ThyssenKrupp exists for barely 40 years now, but for this short period it got famous for the developing of TWIN elevators and technology for non-rope working elevators. Along with the development of the cloud technologies and Internet of Things (IoT), the company widens the possibilities to transform the industry, which has changed too little from the time of the Industrial revolution.

“The cities are growing with space speed and the slow development of the elevator industry is becoming an obstacle for the modern story building. When our team started researches for the best industry practices, where the technologies are developing faster, like in aviation, we asked ourselves “what can we do to apply these approaches on the elevator industry””, said Andreas Schierenbeck, CEO of ThyssenKrupp Elevator.

ThyssenKrupp has deep expertize in the area of mechanics and engineering, which gives them the opportunity to develop the elevator industry. But to make it happen, they need powerful technological solutions, in order to analyze big amount of data in real time from millions of elevators all over the world. After Schierenbeck met Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, at a conference, they started to cooperate quite fast. ThyssenKrupp soon meet the Microsoft experts of data and software engineering area, to figure out how to use the power of Microsoft Azure Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and to apply them for the improvement of the elevators support and make it more efficient.

“Microsoft showed us that they really understand our business and what we are trying to achieve”, said Fabio Speggiorin, Executive Vice President of R&D at ThyssenKrupp Elevator. “With the Azure IoT technology, we got a product, which is good enough to cover our needs, despite the large scale of our activity, which is developing in more than 150 countries and continue to grow. The IoT technologies are providing us a solution to have full control over the data, which we gather from millions of elevator sensors daily. We can modify the data so that it meets our demands, and not vice versa.”

The conceptual framework for MAX comes ahead thanks to the joint activities between the specialists in elevators support of ThyssenKrupp Elevator and the software engineers of Microsoft, who are deeply immersed in the possibilities of the cloud platform Microsoft Azure. ThyssenKrupp integrates the Microsoft expertize in the area of cloud technologies, including real time monitoring and data analyze, with its own high qualitative services in elevators production and support. The result of these efforts is MAX: a powerful solution, which gives TKE unprecedented possibilities to provide real time forecast for the future repairs, which are to be made, shows the components to be exchanged and thus gives possibilities for proactive maintenance.

The cooperation with TKE gives Microsoft many new possibilities, too – “We had the opportunity to meet ThyssenKrupp team and to apply all we have learnt from them to our latest pre-configurations of IoT solutions, Microsoft Azure IoT Suite, which allows companies to start using IoT faster. We are eager to see what TKE can do with Azure IoT Suite, when they start to use MAX in whole North America and Europe”, said Barb Edson, General Manager, Marketing, Cloud and Enterprise.

The improvement of the elevators supports is something bigger than just the decreasing of the time, spent for the repairing of the elevators and the minimizing of the time the employees spent to travel to and from their offices. ThyssenKrupp defines MAX as the main part of a quite big puzzle, specifically: defining how will the cities of the future look, where 70% of the world population will live till 2050.

Together with the cities development, the efficiency and mobility are becoming more important. Now, the buildings are the biggest power consumers, the consumption levels reach up to 40% of the global energy consumption. So the possibility to reduce the energy consumption of the elevators with up to 10% turns into opportunity to save means and power. It is calculated that the employees in the offices spend around 16,6 years every year to wait for elevators. With MAX and its whole potential, TKE expect to reduce this figure in half, and to increase the efficiency significantly, and at the same time to save people from additional stress.

“Finally, all this is done in order to increase the mobility inside the buildings, so that people can get where they want as soon and safe as possible.”, concluded заключи Schierenbeck.

With MAX, ThyssenKrupp shows the world how the cloud and IoT can help for the gathering of new ideas for the traditional industries, so that they can modernized the city environment in a way, which will change the cities, the companies and the business opportunities.