The History of Lift Traffic Control

The advent of FAPB (Fully Automatic Push Button) made the human operator or dispatcher redundant. Then the way lifts responded to passenger demands was in the imagination of “programmers” using relay logic and then programmers using digital computers. This paper looks at the history of the early relay based controllers and draws attention to their remarkable sophistication. These include: nearest car, fixed sectoring and dynamic sectoring. The ultimate traffic control, now used extensively and often inappropriately, is Hall Call Allocation. First described by G D Closs in 1970 (extending Leo Port’s 1961 work), analysed by Sergio dos Santos in 1974 and implemented by Joris Schroeder in 1990.