Artificial Intelligence in Practice

44KONE: Using Artificial Intelligence To Move Millions Of People Every Day

Finnish-headquartered elevator and escalator engineering and maintenance group KONE are responsible for 1.1 million elevators worldwide.

It considers its mission to be to improve the flow of urban life, and at Heathrow Airport in London alone it is responsible for moving 191,000 people every day using 1,035 escalators, elevators and autowalks.

In 2017, KONE announced an ambitious data-driven program with the target of measuring and analyzing data collected from thousands of pieces of machinery all round the world. The information will be processed with machine learning algorithms and made available to other operators and maintenance businesses.

What Problems Is Artificial Intelligence Helping To Solve?

With so many moving parts across a large number of complicated systems, breakdowns and faulty equipment can mean that thousands of people are affected by delays.

Having to wait until things go wrong before remedies can be put into place leads to further downtime and inefficiency, while replacement parts are sourced and moved to the locations where they are needed.

As well as this, coordinating different people-moving equipment in large buildings is a difficult task. When someone presses an elevator call button, the system has to decide which car is best placed to respond. In many situations this won't be the closest one – which may already be full, or heading in the wrong direction. As this is traditionally ...