Customer Background
Drawing on over 100 years of expertise in elevator and escalator solutions, our customer, a leading Finnish company, is revolutionising how people move within buildings. This global leader leverages cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing to create smart, safe, and sustainable mobility solutions in over 60 countries worldwide.
Customer Need
The customer’s next-generation elevators equipped with IP cameras, were connected to remote support centres to assist during emergencies, via an emergency chat feature. However, their current setup relied on separate cloud solution providers for camera management functions and video storage for subsequent processing, leading to increased complexity and vendor lock-in. They desired a more flexible solution — one that was agnostic to both camera vendors and cloud providers, and streamed elevator video directly to their cloud-hosted application. With a proven track record of successful projects with this customer and extensive expertise in AWS cloud application development, Softdel emerged as the ideal partner for this transformation.
Softdel’s Solution
- Softdel engineered a versatile, vendor and cloud-agnostic camera video streaming solution for the customer’s emergency communication feature.
- AWS-based camera management portal for device provisioning and management was developed, offering several key features:
- Universal camera support by seamlessly onboarding new and existing IP/USB-based cameras regardless of vendor and the communication interface.
- List of all cameras with status information like last heartbeat, errors, and more, with the ability to move cameras between sites.
- Robust user management including multi-user support, user authentication, and role-based access control for better data security.
- Flexible video streaming of time-stamped high resolution and compressed videos, still images, and audio, even during maintenance or software updates.
- Multi tab video streaming support in order serve the use case of remote agent supporting multiple sites for emergency communication in parallel.
- The solution’s emergency chat functionality – on the In-car infotainment device – was also enhanced, connecting to new IP/USB cameras which were then onboarded to the portal. The app continuously monitors camera health by sending periodic ‘heartbeats’ – a signal to determine camera status – to the portal.
- Additionally, data flow and communication were streamlined to enhance efficiency:
- The camera data streamed through AWS Kinesis to the web portal, enabling video streaming, capturing still images and handling audio via the In-car infotainment device.
- The web portal used AWS IoT Core and MQTT to communicate with the app, and integrated REST API for seamless interfacing with Salesforce Cloud.
- The web APIs enabled authorised third-party portals, such as Fire Rooms, to access camera details and even pull video feed data from the AWS Kinesis for easier interoperability and faster responses during emergencies.
- We ensured enhanced cybersecurity for all camera communication by utilising the ONVIF (Open Network Video Interface Forum) protocol, which provides a common software platform for IP based camera device communication.
Standards and Technology
Cloud: AWS
Communication Protocol: MQTT, HTTPS, WebSocket
Backend: Lambda, API Gateway
Database: RDS
Backend: Kinesis, CloudWatch, S3, Cognito, IoT Core
Benefits
- Unmatched flexibility: The new solution is camera agnostic in the truest sense, enabling the customer to switch vendors and customise the solution for future needs, while also retaining full ownership of the intellectual property.
- Driving AI solution: The solution empowered the customer to utilise video and image analytics to further develop their AI-powered predictive maintenance, thus creating smarter elevators.
- Enhanced safety: The solution facilitated faster and authorised video access to registered third-party websites, significantly improving emergency response and enhancing elevator safety for passengers.
- Reduced data costs: The solution intelligently minimised data usage by only streaming video when it was actively viewed, eliminating unnecessary data consumption during downtime. Additionally, as the portal minimalised reliance on third-party platforms, the associated costs could be reduced.
