Together, the PerformancePak tools form a powerful toolkit with overwhelming value. The Embedded Systems Conference Spring was held in Chicago the first week in March. While attendance was down slightly from last year, the conference sessions continued to be successful. In all, there were over 90 speakers and 90 sessions with over 2800 attendees. Otis Elevators deals with surprisingly complex systems.
Elevator control requires a distributed computation system.
For example, a typical hotel building with a bank of 8 elevators can have over a hundred processors, ranging from microcontrollers to high horsepower CPUs. They communicate over three or four different networks, creating a very complex distributed system. Communication structure is critical to handle this kind of real-time data flow. Further, as new generations of elevators are designed, the number and sophistication of intelligent devices will grow. To overcome this challenge Otis was looking for a single, powerful communication model.