Lifting Elevators into the Cloud – Permanent Detection of Wear Using Intelligent Sensors

Condition Monitoring Systems for elevators going beyond a mere display of stored faults or counter readings are hard to find on the lift market. Yet, only a few sensors already allow the monitoring of significant components of a lift system to ensure that wear is detected at an early stage and appropriate servicing recommendations are automatically generated. As such, a predictive maintenance of lifts is possible, which saves a lot of resources and time and nevertheless warrants a high availability of the lift system. Especially for retrofitting of existing lifts an intelligent device is needed, which doesn't need communication to the lift controller. Within the context of a field trial, several lift systems worldwide have been equipped with an IoT-device (Internet of Things) which evaluates every single elevator ride on the edge using intelligent algorithms permitting the wear of individual component groups to be detected. The collected data, resulting messages and alerts are transmitted automatically via the internet by a standard protocol into a cloud, where extended Big Data Analysis is done.