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Need a Lift?: An Elevator Queuing Problem

Dr. Robert E. LaBarre and Dr. Slaven Stricevic, UTRC

United Technologies Research Center is the research arm of the United Technologies Corporation, a multifaceted manufacturing company with interests in commercial and military jet engines (Pratt & Whitney Aircraft), helicopters (Sikorsky), fuel cells (UTFC), heating and air conditioning (Carrier), airplane subsystems (Hamilton Sundstrand), and elevators (Otis Elevator), among other businesses.

The problem we propose for the workshop is directly related to our elevator business, led by Otis. It involves the efficient dispatching of people requesting service from an elevator in a high-rise building. This is a multifaceted problem, which, in its entirety would be too large to attempt during such a short workshop. One reason is that the flow of people through a building takes on different characteristics depending on such things as: building use (office, apartment, commercial retail, etc.), time of day, existence of "attraction" floors, parking garages, and other factors.

Current approaches to improving dispatching are centered around discrete event simulations, taking into account things like passenger arrival rates, service requests from floor landings (hall calls) and from inside cars (car calls), motion profiles of the car, including acceleration and deceleration rates, loading and unloading times, number of elevator cars, capacity of the car, etc.

Our goal from this workshop is to attempt to understand dispatching from a more analytic perspective, and to understand how elevator dispatching fits into the world of other routing problems. How is it different? How is it similar? Can methods used in these other fields lead to analytic methods for elevators?

References
  • Gina Barney, Elevator Traffic Handbook : Theory and Practice, Spon (London) 2003.


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