Vertical transportation in buildings

Nowadays, the building industry and its associated technologies are experiencing a period of rapid growth, which requires an equivalent growth regarding technologies in the field of vertical transportation. Therefore, the installation of synchronised elevator groups in modern buildings is a common practice in order to govern the dispatching, allocation and movement of the cars shaping the group. So, elevator control and management has become a major field of application for Artificial Intelligence approaches. Methodologies such as fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, ant colonies, or multiagent systems are being successfully proposed in the scientific literature, and are being adopted by the leading elevator companies as elements that differentiate them from their competitors. In this sense, the most relevant companies are adopting strategies based on the protection of their discoveries and inventions as registered patents in different countries throughout the world. This paper presents a comprehensive state of the art of the most relevant recent patents on computer science applied to vertical transportationConsejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa, Junta de Andalucía P07-TEP-02832, Spain

Dynamic fuzzy logic elevator group control system for energy optimization

High-rise buildings with a considerable number of elevators represent a major logistic problem concerning saving space and time due to economic reasons. For this reason, complex Elevator Group Control Systems are developed in order to manage the elevators properly. Furthermore, the subject of energy is acquiring more and more industrial relevance every day as far as sustainable development is concerned. In this paper, the first entirely dynamic Fuzzy Logic Elevator Group Control System to dispatch landing calls so as to minimize energy consumption, especially during interfloor traffic, is proposed. The fuzzy logic design described here constitutes not only an innovative solution that outperforms usual dispatchers but also an easy, cheap, feasible and reliable solution, which is possible to be implemented in real industry controllers

Una revisión del estado del arte de los problemas asociados al transporte vertical mediante ascensores en edificios

El transporte vertical es una disciplina que estudia los movimientos de personas en edificios. Los edificios altos se han convertido en una construcción común hoy en día. En dichos edificios, el transporte vertical es un problema que requiere un enfoque sistemático y ordenado. Así, para casos extremos en determinados edificios singulares, la ordenación del transporte vertical se convierte en un problema muy difícil de manejar, especialmente cuando diferentes personas llegan casi al mismo tiempo a plantas específicas deseando viajar hasta otras plantas de destino. Para resolver tales situaciones, la instalación de sistemas de control de grupos de ascensores (conocidos en inglés como Elevator Group Control Systems, EGCS) es una práctica habitual. Los EGCS se utilizan para gestionar ascensores coordinados múltiples en un edificio con el objeto de transportar pasajeros de manera eficiente. Los EGCS deben satisfacer las demandas asignando un ascensor a cada llamada de planta, realizando el despacho de ascensores atendiendo a diferentes criterios de optimización. Este artículo realiza una revisión sistemática y muestra distintas clasificaciones de las contribuciones más relevantes en la industria del transporte vertical, abordando tanto la revisión de la literatura científica, como las patentes en la industria y los trabajos recogidos en revistas de carácter profesional.Plan Nacional de I+D TI-331/2002Plan Nacional de I+D DPI2010- 15352Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa de la Junta de Andalucía P07-TEP-0283

A brief review on vertical transportation research and open issue

Book of Proceedings of the International Joint Conference-CIO-ICIEOM-IIE-AIM (IJC 2016), "XX Congreso de Ingeniería de Organización", "XXII International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management, "International IISE Conference 2016, "International AIM Conference 2016". Donostia-San Sebastian (Spain), July 13-15, 2016Vertical transportation refers to the movements of people in buildings. High-rise buildings have emerged as a common construction nowadays. In such buildings, the vertical transportation is extremely difficult to manage, specially, when the people arrive at the same time at specific floors wanting to travel to other floors. To solve such situations, the installation of elevator group control systems (EGCS) is a usual practice. EGCS are used to manage multiple elevators in a building to efficiently transport passengers. EGCSs need to meet the demands by assigning an elevator to each landing call while optimizing several criteria. This paper reviews the most relevant contributions in vertical transportation industr

Hybrid of multi-car elevator system and double-deck elevator system

Multi-car elevator system is a new breakthrough in an elevator system in 2001. It has broken the traditional concept of developing only one elevator car in an elevator shaft. Multi-car elevator system can have more than one elevator car moving in an elevator shaft and it has improved a lot in minimizing the waiting time of passengers if compared with only one elevator car in an elevator shaft. The main advantage of multi-car elevator system is to reduce the construction cost where 30% of the core-tube area of the elevator system is made up of shaft. By developing multi-car elevator system, many of elevator shafts need not to be developed and it still can perform about the same efficiency in serving passengers. However, it is still not able to transport a large number of passengers efficiently if the passengers are calling from the same floor, especially during the up-peak traffic. For that reason, the feature of double-deck elevator system is integrated into multi-car elevator system to develop a new hybridized elevator system called “Hybrid of multi-car elevator system and double-deck elevator system” to solve the limited car capacity problem. The performance of both systems, the hybridized elevator system and the multi-car elevator system is simulated. The result shows that the average journey time of the hybridized elevator system is shorter than the multicar elevator system in all the three traffic modes, i.e. up-peak, down-peak and inter-floor traffics. For the up-peak traffic mode of the hybridized elevator system, it manages to achieve the best result of 33.5% shorter of the average journey time compared to the multi-car elevator system

A review of multi-car elevator system

This paper presents a review of a new generation of elevator system, the Multi-Car Elevator System. It is an elevator system which contains more than one elevator car in the elevator shaft. In the introduction, it explains why the Multi-Car Elevator System is a new trend elevator system based on its structural design, cost saving and efficiency in elevator system. Different types of Multi-Car Elevator System such as circulation or loop-type, non-circulation and bifurcate circulation are described in section 2. In section 3, researches on dispatch strategies, control strategies and avoidance of car collision strategies of Multi-Car Elevator System since 2002 are reviewed. In the discussion section, it reveals some drawbacks of the Multi-Car Elevator System in transport capability and the risk of car collision. There are recommendations to the future work as well

OTIMIZAÇÃO COM ALGORITMO BIO-INSPIRADO DE CONTROLE DE TRÁFEGO EM SISTEMAS DE GRUPOS DE ELEVADORES

Resumo. Este artigo tem como objetivo apresentar a implementação de uma técnica de otimização bioinspirada como solução ao problema de controle de tráfego em sistemas de grupos de elevadores (EGCS). A técnica de controle usada é o algoritmo de otimização por inteligência de enxame (PSO - swarm optimization particle) de tipo binário. A ideia é que o algoritmo escolha o melhor elevador para um usuário que faz uma chamada de serviço em umsistema de controle destino (DCS ”“ destination control system). Para a escolha do elevador o algoritmo tem uma função custo que considera as variáveis: (1) tempo de espera; (2) tempo de voo; (3) capacidade do elevador; (4) número de paradas alocadas; (5) número de paradas (baseado nas chamadas que são asignadas) para cada elevador. Estes parâmetros são ponderados de acordo com sua importância e inferência na seleção do melhor elevador. Assim, o sistema seleciona de todas as possíveis soluções encontradas a solução que apresenteo melhor valor de aptidão (a solução representa o elevador ou os elevadores selecionado para atender a atual chamada)

Optimization for Urban Mobility Systems

In the recent decades, new modes of transportation have been developed due to urbanization, highly dense population, and technological advancement. As a result, design and operation of urban transportation have become increasingly important to better utilize the resources and efficiently meet demand. This dissertation was motivated by two problems on optimizing design and control of urban transportation. In the first one, we consider a problem of dynamically matching heterogeneous market parcitipants so as to maximize the total number of matching, which was motivated by practices of ride-sharing platforms. In the other problem, we study efficient design of elevator zoning system in high-rises with uncertainty in customer batching.In Chapter 1, we consider a multiperiod stochastic optimization of a market that matches heterogeneous and impatient agents. The model was mainly motivated from carpooling products run by ride-sharing platforms such as Uber and Lyft, and kidney exchange market, where market participants are heterogeneous in terms of how likely they can be matched with others. In the case of a ride-sharing platform, one of the key operational decisions for carpooling is to efficiently match riders and clear the market in a timely manner. In doing so, the platform needs to take into account the heterogeneity of riders in terms of their trip types(e.g origin-destination pair) and different matching compatibility. For example, some customers may request rides within San Francisco, while others may request rides from San Francisco to outside the city. Since picking up and dropping off a customer within the city can be done within relatively short amount of time, those who want to travel within the city can be matched with any other riders for carpooling. However, the destinations of those who want to travel to outside the city may be very different, and in order to maintain customers' additional transit time due to carpooling, it is likely that they can be only matched with those who want to travel within the city. In the case of kidney exchange where market participants arrive in the form of patient-donor pair, pairs with donor who can donate her kidney to most of patients (for example, blood type O) and patient who can get kidney from most of donors (for example, blood type AB) can be easily matched to other pairs. The opposite case would be hard-to-match pair that is incompatible for matching with most of other pairs. Our model is an abstraction of these two motivating examples, and considers two types of agents: easy-to-match agents that can be matched with either type of agents, and hard-to-match agents that can be only matched with easy-to-match ones. We first formulate a dynamic program to solve for optimal matching decisions over infinite time horizon in a discrete time setting, and characterize structure of optimal stationary policies. Inspired by practices in kidney exchange where the market is cleared for every fixed time interval, we connect the discrete time model to a continuous time setting by investigating the effect of the length of matching intervals on the matching performance. Results from numerical experiments indicate certain patterns in the relationship between the length of matching intervals and the maximum number of matching achieved, and provides valuable insights for future direction of research. In Chapter 2, we consider a zoning problem for elevator dispatching systems in high-rises. In practice, zoning is frequently used to improve efficiency of elevator systems. The idea of zoning is to prevent different elevators from stopping at common floors, which may result in long service times of elevators and thus long waiting times of customers. Our goal is to provide a mathematical framework that can help a system planner decide optimal zoning design with some performance guarantee. To this end, we focus on uppeak traffic situation during morning rush hour, which is in general the heaviest traffic during the day. The performance in the uppeak traffic situation can be considered as the system's capacity, because if the system can handle uppeak traffic well, it can also serve other types of traffic with good performance. Thus, the performance measure in the uppeak traffic situation can be used as a metric to choose the optimal zoning configuration. One of the components that complicate the problem is customer batching, on which the system may not have a control. In view of this, we formulate an adversarial optimization problem that can measure the system performance of different zoning decisions. By considering the heaviest traffic situation of the day and using the adversarial framework, we provide a model that can be used for capacity planning of elevator systems. We formulate mixed-integer linear program(MILP)s to find the optimal zoning configuration. To solve the MILPs, we show that we can use simple greedy algorithms and solve smaller linear programs. We also provide a few illustrative examples as well as numerical experiments to verify the theoretical results and obtain insights for further analysis

Optimal seismic retrofitting of existing RC frames through soft-computing approaches

2016 - 2017Ph.D. Thesis proposes a Soft-Computing approach capable of supporting the engineer judgement in the selection and design of the cheapest solution for seismic retrofitting of existing RC framed structure. Chapter 1 points out the need for strengthening the existing buildings as one of the main way of decreasing economic and life losses as direct consequences of earthquake disasters. Moreover, it proposes a wide, but not-exhaustive, list of the most frequently observed deficiencies contributing to the vulnerability of concrete buildings. Chapter 2 collects the state of practice on seismic analysis methods for the assessment the safety of the existing buildings within the framework of a performancebased design. The most common approaches for modeling the material plasticity in the frame non-linear analysis are also reviewed. Chapter 3 presents a wide state of practice on the retrofitting strategies, intended as preventive measures aimed at mitigating the effect of a future earthquake by a) decreasing the seismic hazard demands; b) improving the dynamic characteristics supplied to the existing building. The chapter presents also a list of retrofitting systems, intended as technical interventions commonly classified into local intervention (also known “member-level” techniques) and global intervention (also called “structure-level” techniques) that might be used in synergistic combination to achieve the adopted strategy. In particular, the available approaches and the common criteria, respectively for selecting an optimum retrofit strategy and an optimal system are discussed. Chapter 4 highlights the usefulness of the Soft-Computing methods as efficient tools for providing “objective” answer in reasonable time for complex situation governed by approximation and imprecision. In particular, Chapter 4 collects the applications found in the scientific literature for Fuzzy Logic, Artificial Neural Network and Evolutionary Computing in the fields of structural and earthquake engineering with a taxonomic classification of the problems in modeling, simulation and optimization. Chapter 5 “translates” the search for the cheapest retrofitting system into a constrained optimization problem. To this end, the chapter includes a formulation of a novel procedure that assembles a numerical model for seismic assessment of framed structures within a Soft-Computing-driven optimization algorithm capable to minimize the objective function defined as the total initial cost of intervention. The main components required to assemble the procedure are described in the chapter: the optimization algorithm (Genetic Algorithm); the simulation framework (OpenSees); and the software environment (Matlab). Chapter 6 describes step-by-step the flow-chart of the proposed procedure and it focuses on the main implementation aspects and working details, ranging from a clever initialization of the population of candidate solutions up to a proposal of tuning procedure for the genetic parameters. Chapter 7 discusses numerical examples, where the Soft-Computing procedure is applied to the model of multi-storey RC frames obtained through simulated design. A total of fifteen “scenarios” are studied in order to assess its “robustness” to changes in input data. Finally, Chapter 8, on the base of the outcomes observed, summarizes the capabilities of the proposed procedure, yet highlighting its “limitations” at the current state of development. Some possible modifications are discussed to enhance its efficiency and completeness. [edited by author]XVI n.s