Developer interview

To do this, instead of looking at elevators in terms of individual travel events, we focused on the facilitation of the entire experience as people travel from the entrance to their desk. Taking advantage of the synergy between the Elevator Operations Management Simulation, which we have provided for some time, and the People Flow Simulation that includes in-station congestion prediction, which Hitachi Group has cultivated in the railway field, we began developing a people flow analysis system supporting the planning of installations of elevators and other facilities looking at the entirety of a building," said Hatori.

To solve the problem, Hitachi developed the People Flow Simulator to predict the mutual influence between users and elevators and simulate using computer graphics people's movement in the building. Users input information into The People Flow Simulator such as building layouts, number of floors, elevators, escalators, security gates, and automatic doors, and the number of people traveling from the entrance to doors of the rooms, for each building. The simulator then visualizes the movement of elevators, the total number of people waiting and the length of waiting times at elevator areas. "To ensure people's uncertain behaviors are represented in the simulation, we actually went to sites to observe the movement of people, in addition to the theoretical data analysis studies. Why did this person move like this and why did that person not do the same thing? Also, using on-site information, we increased the accuracy of the simulator's predictions," said Fujiwara.
The People Flow Simulator supports customers' building facilities installation plans, enabling movement inside the building to be optimized.
"The People Flow Simulator enables us to intuitively understand the problem of flow lines and the extent of congestion. The tool emphasizes the sharing of thoughts with customers in the process for developing a building facilities installation plan and the ideas for making decisions. It’s very useful for communication and conveying information to customers. Customers have told us the simulations were easy to understand and enabled them to understand the movement of elevators at a glance," said Fujiwara.

Conventional elevator operations management targeted even interval operations. While advancing development, we found that this was not able to react to sudden increases of people, such as during the morning commute, during lunch, or after meetings and seminars where many participants would gather, causing crowds.
People Flow Predicting Elevator Operations Management System FI-700, the latest elevator operations management system, improves on the above-mentioned situation. It is built and controlled based on the expertise in prediction obtained through development of the People Flow Simulator.
The concept underlying it is a shift of thinking from car-oriented thinking to serve cars efficiently to people flow-oriented thinking that designs a smooth flow of people in the building.
"Our goal is to provide a comfortable traveling environment aligned to the unconscious behaviors of each user. Many different kinds of information related to use and operations are stored in a database, and directions can be sent to cars automatically ahead of the users’ thoughts. For example, in Building A, many people rush to the elevators from the 1F entrance at 8:30 am every morning, especially on Mondays. Based on a database containing a record of this, we can have 3 elevators waiting for them every morning, and have 4 elevators on Mondays," said Hatori.
FI-700 predicts the flow of people and reacts to their movements, achieving up to a 20% reduction of waiting time.* In Japan, those were introduced in large cities, and have drawn high expectations.

In addition, a young employee who joined the company in 2019 is involved in the project, bringing with them the perspective of a new era led by technology, "I was assigned to this project in my second year in the company. I think People Flow Analysis is a key technology that broadens the potential of elevators. Through conversations with customers as we worked to create building facility plans, I also realized the usefulness of the technology to support visual, easy-to-understand facility plans. In developing new technologies and services for the future, the simulator enables us to evaluate the flow of people in a virtual space. I would like to use it to evaluate the operability of the products we develop, to develop products that users want, which makes customers happy and enables us to quickly provide products. I’ll do my best in development," said Saito.

In this era, things change rapidly. In any era, focused on their goal of a safe, secure, and comfortable future for people, buildings, and society, the endeavors of the People Flow Analysis Technology project members continue.

Release Date: January 25, 2021