Comprehensive Dynamic Zoning Algorithms

During Elevcon’95 held in Hong Kong, a paper was presented, that brought the term ‘dynamic zoning’ to the world. ‘Dynamic zoning’ was an improved version of the ‘channelling’ technique developed almost a decade ago. In volume 1 of International Journal of Elevator Engineering, that paper on dynamic zoning was further elaborated and more details were included. However, up to this moment, the consideration has been with up-peak and down-peak conditions only. In this paper, the concept of dynamic zoning has been extended to include random interfloor traffic conditions as well while up-peak and down-peak become special cases. The most general traffic condition of interfloor traffic with unequal floor demand and population is employed to arrive at an appropriate ‘equivalent round trip time’ for each car with an assigned zone. A cost function based on the optimal equivalent round trip time of all cars is used to select the best zoning using a genetic algorithm due to its high speed of convergence. Hence, the name ‘comprehensive’ is adopted.