Elevator Group Optimization in a Smart Building

Abstract

In this research the elevator group scheduling problem via the use of meta-heuristic optimization techniques is studied. Most researchers have considered the service time as the measurement of elevator performance currently the engineering culture is trending towards the greener technology that weighs the energy consumption of elevator systems for high and mid rise buildings. From service time reduction techniques of the existing body of research a technique based on trip scheduling model and the branch and bound algorithm is independently replicated to study its capacity to produce competitive results. The optimization criterion is modified by adding the energy consumption aspect of the elevator system. Several result sets over different dimensions of the problem space were recorded to evaluate this approach. It is shown that newly proposed technique can achieve better energy consumption measures in wide range of configuration of the problem space with better or approximately equal service time performance. The overall energy consumption reduction is 20% in the general scenario while the service time increase is 15%. The stability of the algorithm is also shown for mid-high rise buildings.