3 ms·

I would imagine that this is geared towards situations where the elevator is always going up. I would say that this is also affected by the business / time of

I would imagine that this is geared towards situations where the elevator is always going up. I would say that this is also affected by the business / time of day. I would say that around 5pm you have more people going down than up so this algorithm falls flat on it's face. I don't think you could write 1 algorithm and it works for everyone. You could generalise it to apartment buildings but I think there would be a pattern of more people going down at the beginning of the day than at the end of the day too.

nmridul 15y ago
I don't know whether an elevator algorithm is as simple as what is mentioned in the article. The algorithm needs to take into consideration the type of lift (lifts in an housing complex vs commercial building) and time of the day. During morning hours, the lifts in an housing complex might more frequently travel towards the ground floor while the one in a business complex would be travelling up. Also, there could be buildings where the top floors might have more tenants than bottom ones or the reverse. There is a scope for self learning algorithm that can adjust its idle position depending on past behaviours. But elevator algo becomes more complicated when two persons press the switch at same time for the lift. One is at 2nd floor and wants to go up, the other at 4th and wants to go down and lift is at 3rd floor :-)
TheCapn 15y ago
Then what is the problem with treating elevators in the same way that traffic lights are treated in many cities: adjust for the time of day. Using my workplace as the anecdote the elevators get massive usage at 8:00AM as people arrive at work, the majority of calls are from 1st & 2nd floors (you can enter the building on both floors at 8:00, noon and 5:00). After that there is the 9:30-10:30 coffee rush with elevators going up and down. The noon rush, afternoon coffee and evening rush. Those are the peak points of the day with simple scenarios for when people are most commonly going up down so it wouldn't be difficult to implement scenarios where the algorithm changes at a time.

nmridul 15y ago

I don't know whether an elevator algorithm is as simple as what is mentioned in the article. The algorithm needs to take into consideration the type of lift (lifts in an housing complex vs commercial building) and time of the day. During morning hours, the lifts in an housing complex might more frequently travel towards the ground floor while the one in a business complex would be travelling up. Also, there could be buildings where the top floors might have more tenants than bottom ones or the reverse. There is a scope for self learning algorithm that can adjust its idle position depending on past behaviours. But elevator algo becomes more complicated when two persons press the switch at same time for the lift. One is at 2nd floor and wants to go up, the other at 4th and wants to go down and lift is at 3rd floor :-)

TheCapn 15y ago

Then what is the problem with treating elevators in the same way that traffic lights are treated in many cities: adjust for the time of day. Using my workplace as the anecdote the elevators get massive usage at 8:00AM as people arrive at work, the majority of calls are from 1st & 2nd floors (you can enter the building on both floors at 8:00, noon and 5:00). After that there is the 9:30-10:30 coffee rush with elevators going up and down. The noon rush, afternoon coffee and evening rush. Those are the peak points of the day with simple scenarios for when people are most commonly going up down so it wouldn't be difficult to implement scenarios where the algorithm changes at a time.