Digital Transformation in the Elevator Industry – Moving from Physical Testing to Simulation

Elevator designs are increasingly unique for each customer and are assembled on-site in very diverse environments, from skyscrapers in the desert to large airports as well as cruise ships. This conservative industry still relies on expensive and time-consuming physical testing. In particular, the software testing is a huge challenge because of the variability of the product and the late integration with the mechanical system in an elevator shaft.

Schindler Elevator Ltd. has recognized the benefits of a model-based validation workflow and actively drives its introduction in the development process.

The in-house modelling and simulation environment EDEn (Elevator Dynamics Environment) enables engineers to test system behavior early in the development process. EDEn provides various tools developed in MATLAB^®, Simulink^®, and Simscape™ to cover offline simulations using web-based applications as well as hardware-in-the-loop tests with Speedgoat real-time systems.

As a result, a complete software testing campaign has been reduced from three to four weeks with physical prototypes to a single night of automated simulation runs, greatly reducing commissioning costs and risks whilst establishing this model-centric development as one of the key enablers for digital transformation of the whole organization.