High-rise buildings require the installation of complex elevator group control
systems (EGCS). In vertical transportation, when a passenger makes a hall call by pressing a
landing call button installed at the floor and located near the cars of the elevator group, the
EGCS must allocate one of the cars of the group to the hall call. We develop a Particle Swarm
Optimization (PSO) algorithm to deal with this car-call allocation problem. The PSO algorithm
is compared to other soft computing techniques such as genetic algorithm and tabu search
approaches that have been proved as efficient algorithms for this problem. The proposed PSO
algorithm was tested in high-rise buildings from 10 to 24 floors, and several car configurations
from 2 to 6 cars. Results from trials show that the proposed PSO algorithm results in better
average journey times and computational times compared to genetic and tabu search
approaches
