Nowadays is very common the presence of tall buildings in the business centres of
the main cities of the world. Such buildings require the installation of numerous lifts that are
coordinated and managed under a unique control system. Population working in the buildings
follows a similar traffic pattern generating situations of traffic congestion. The problem arises
when a passenger makes a hall call wishing to travel to another floor of the building. The
dispatching of the most suitable car is the optimization problem we are tackling in this paper.
We develop a viral system algorithm which is based on a bio-inspired virus infection analogy to
deal with it. The viral system algorithm is compared to genetic algorithms, and tabu search
approaches that have proven efficiency in the vertical transportation literature. The
experiments undertaken in tall buildings from 10 to 24 floors, and several car configurations
from 2 to 6 cars, provide valuable results and show how viral system outperforms such soft
computing algorithms.Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación (España
