Improving the Maintainability of Elevators with Virtual Tools

Maintainability is a key factor affecting the reliability and life-time operating costs of elevators. This paper presents a new approach to ensure and produce an optimum maintainability to elevators by utilizing virtual tools. Performing and testing of maintenance tasks already in the development and design phases with digital tools in virtual environment verify the maintainability aspects and enables the minimization of safety risks. At the same time this procedure enables the production of realistic training material and service manuals. As a result the need for design changes is reduced already in the first physical prototype. This will reduce the time-to-market of new products and enhance the life-time maintainability - both technically and economically.