My office tower has 6 elevators. 3 transfer buses are coming in from the subway @ 8:50, around 120 people are coming trough the security gates and approaching the elevators more or less simultaneously. It takes me approx 20 minutes until i get to my floor every single morning, because only one elevator comes at a time and since i am a gentlemen, i usually let the ladies go first. Even more, you can call an elevator only when another went off, otherwise the full one won't move and will open it's doors instead.
OTIS, i hate you.
Do elevator algorithms communicate with external systems, such as swipe cards?<p>For example, when an employee swipes through the security gates, the elevator is called.<p>Also curious if elevators use statistical analysis for predicting trends over time. A four-elevator system in an office tower would likely give the cars preference to being near the first floor at 8:30am. Is this what fuzzy logic schedulers do?
Another optimization criteria not mentioned is energy efficiency. I would guess that elevator manufacturers try to prevent elevators from consuming excess power. It would probably be bad if an elevator went back and forth between the same floors many times with no one inside it, just because it expected a slightly higher chance of finding a passenger at the destination.
I have always felt that other industries do not require the same amount of learning to keep up with and that in general since the knowledge base is lower, you can become and remain an expert with less amount of knowledge then software engineering/telecom/computer engineering.<p>The reason I feel this way is because there is not as many people involved in other fields, the information is not easy to access (think RFCs, programming language guides/books/frameworks etc.), and there are not that many people blogging & writing on websites about the complicated details of their respective industry.<p>It was still interesting to see that a book on elevator function theory was mentioned near the end of the article, but I doubt that this or many other fields require a lot of complicated know-how (and that needs to be constantly updated). Could I be wrong with my assumptions ?
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<a href="http://vedantmisra.com.nyud.net/2011/12/elevator-algorithms/" rel="nofollow">http://vedantmisra.com.nyud.net/2011/12/elevator-algorithms/</a>