What is the first thing you do when you step into an elevator? For most people: push the button of the floor you are going to. Not so with a new breed of elevators manufactured by Schindler North America. These elevators have the buttons on the outside, not inside. The buttons for selecting your floor are on each floor. Instead of just pushing a single up or down button to hail an elevator, you push the button for the floor you want as though you were inside.
The benefit is better elevator customer service. Elevator cars operate more efficiently which means you get to the right floor faster. How? By selecting your floor sooner (while waiting for the elevator to arrive) the elevator’s computer has more timely input about peoples’ destinations. It can calculate the optimal pattern of pickups and dropoffs, then execute it faster than traditional elevators. Here is how this new elevator, called the Miconic 10, operates:
“Miconic 10 ® advanced software drives a powerful logic program that systematically rationalizes elevator traffic flow in a building. It employs a sophisticated algorithm to manage the complexities of traffic patterns as they change throughout the day and to group passengers together with the same departure and/or destination floors.
With any conventional control, passengers can only tell the elevator system that they want to travel either ‘Up’ or ‘Down’. Likewise, everyone tries to get into the first car that arrives, often causing overcrowding, then scrambling to push the buttons once inside the car. As a result, the car will probably stop at every floor on the way up.
The first elevator was built by Archimedes probably in 236 B.C. It has come a long way since then.