An intelligent elevator

An Intelligent Elevator SogetiLabs blog January 2016 by Rik Marselis Page 1 of 2

Many years ago I read the sci-fi-classic “The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy” by

Douglas Adams. I was intrigued by the scene of the elevator that could see in the

future. The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter has the

capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be

on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it. This way when

you walk towards the elevator it just appears and already knows what floor to bring

you to, so the waiting time is eliminated.

Back then it sounded totally

impossible to me. How could

an elevator know about the

future? Only a human

elevator-operator could add

intelligence to an elevator,

at least that was my

experience back then.

But things have changed.

The first change I noticed

some ten years ago, was

that you had to enter the

desired floor-number while

calling the elevator. That

way the elevator-system could plan the optimal route through the building and the

group of elevators together works as optimal as possible. But although it was more

efficient, that elevator wasn’t waiting for you when you walked towards it.

Nowadays, with RFID sensors omnipresent and all sorts of systems connected through

the Internet of Things (IoT), it’s quite easy to connect the access-gate of a building to

the elevator-system. As soon as you enter the building the elevator knows you’re

coming. So it can actually be waiting for you. But then it only knows you have

arrived, it doesn’t know where you want to go. Or does it?

Most people have a desk at a certain floor. (Even most people that work in a flexible

office still go to the same part of the building every day). So the elevator-system can

remember the floor you normally go to in the morning. This still can’t be called

intelligence, it’s just remembering.

So what about the rest of the day, how does the elevator know where you’re going

when you’re already in the building? Here comes machine learning.

The elevator can store all of your movements and from that, learns to predict where

you want to go, based on your normal pattern. A coffee-machine-service-lady for

example always goes up one floor every time and when she has reached the top-

floor she goes all the way down again. Unfortunately most people are not as

predictable as this.

An intelligent elevator

An Intelligent Elevator SogetiLabs blog January 2016 by Rik Marselis Page 2 of 2

Luckily again the Internet of Things will

help us. Your smartphone holds your

diary. Your diary says you have a

meeting at the seventh floor, connect

your smartphone to the elevator-system

using IoT and the elevator knows where

you want to go.

But still this is not enough, because do

you put “go home” in your diary every

day? (I don’t ;-) Here big data comes in.

The elevator remembers your behaviour

and after some time knows that if you approach the elevator around 17:00 hrs and

you don’t have an appointment you are obviously going home. Combine this big

data solution with an IoT application that notifies the elevator that you have logged

off your computer and the elevator is sure you are going home and thus want to go

to the ground floor.

Real machine intelligence arises when the elevator system uses all data from sensors

and systems, through IoT solutions, combines it with historical data on which it

performs big data analytics and learns from previous experiences, to finally make

intelligent decisions that will surprise people because your elevator really appears just

before you realise you need it.

So the combination of all modern technologies, machine learning, IoT, Big data

analytics and machine intelligence makes the elevator a state of the art type of

robot that uses all kinds of input to be at your service. Although it cannot actually see

in the future, it comes really close.

But although it all sounds nice, as you

know people sometimes (want to) do

unexpected things, so you will still

want some sort of possibility to

override the choice of the elevator,

just like Zaphod and Marvin needed

to convince the elevator to go to the

15th floor in the scene from the

Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.

Because the intelligence of the

elevator is very helpful but does it

totally replace human intelligence?