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For folks that have never seen elevator scheduling the game: https://play.elevatorsaga.com/ Enjoy this rabbit hole :D
I wish there were more games like this. It’s such a simple premise but so satisfyingly difficult after each level. And it even has a bit of randomish failure which makes for even more challenge.
I feel like most cases of wait times are due to elevators "waiting" empty in the wrong floor. They either all wait in the bottom floor, or all wait where they were last left at. Would be better if their waiting floors were distributed throughout the floors so that first response is fast.
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And then when the elevator door opens, they ask the people inside: "Are you going up or down?" There's an arrow showing that, for Christ's sake.
True but sometimes someone hits a button on the inside by mistake. Or someone was going to get off then decides not to.
Destination dispatch should be no worse than standard up/down buttons, right (at least in theory)? It provides additional information about the destination, but it should be possible for that information to be interpreted as if it were just an up/down button press, so RSR could still be used. I have a feeling a better algorithm could in fact make destination dispatch slightly better than RSR... or am I missing someth…
As the article says, the problem with destination dispatch is that it 'locks in' an elevator. The passenger gets told at call time what elevator to go to, and it can't change that mid flight. RSR has the advantage that the passenger has no idea which elevator will come, and so RSR can change the elevator they will get in real-time as conditions change. This was an insight I had not considered before reading the artic…
(I've never encountered destination dispatch myself, so I'm not really sure how it works in practice)
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I haven't ever seen anyone do this in the United States, but I saw it in China and Italy.
I've never seen anyone do this anywhere in the world including Italy. I've never been to China but wouldn't you learn quickly after getting in an elevator going the wrong way not to do that again? The only exception I can see if there's way more people than elevators and you just need to get spot at all costs.
See also: the keep open / close doors button. I had one building administrator explain to me we should add a delay of 10 seconds to the "quickly shut door" button because otherwise she kept getting her arm hit by the door. When I asked why we would add a delay to the button that's meant to reduce delays (why not simply wait for the door to close on its own, then?), and whether we should fix the sensor that prevents doors from closing if there's an obstacle instead, she just kept staring blankly at me. I don't think she understood me at all.
Again, some people simply don't grasp how elevators work.
I've never really liked Destination Dispatch elevators. Besides struggling to find the car I've been assigned to, sometimes you really have to hustle across the lobby to catch it. Then you also run into visitors that assume it's a normal car and can hit a floor button when the get in, only to realize they've walked into a car without buttons.
I work in a building with Destination Dispatch elevators so I'm used to them. I have the opposite problem where I'll get into a normal elevator and just stand there without pushing anything.
The biggest problem I always have with elevators is not the algorithm, it's the people seemingly being unable to grasp the concept of pressing either the up or the down request button, depending on where they want to go. Almost always I find someone will press both, because "then the elevator comes faster". Completely ignoring the fact that they end up going the wrong way first half the time, and adding an unnecessar…
And then when the elevator door opens, they ask the people inside: "Are you going up or down?" There's an arrow showing that, for Christ's sake.
I wonder if this is an artifact of how the author used random destinations. I worked in a building that used Destination Dispatch, and the common travel pattern seemed to be:
- Everyone who is not on the ground floor generally want to go to the ground floor.
- People who are on the ground floor generally travel in large groups to the same destination.
This happens because people who worked on the same floor often leave for lunch at the same time, and return at the same time to the same floor. Destination Dispatch helps in this case because it's batching large groups of people with the same destination.
I feel like most cases of wait times are due to elevators "waiting" empty in the wrong floor. They either all wait in the bottom floor, or all wait where they were last left at. Would be better if their waiting floors were distributed throughout the floors so that first response is fast.
In the middle or end of the day, yes. In the morning, waiting on the bottom floor is the best. Unless you're a hotel. Then the timing is flipped: Wait in a distributed manner in the morning/mid-day, gather on the floor in the evening.
It could also be that you and I simply aren’t privy to what is actually happening “the instant” you are waiting for the elevator.
…which makes me wonder how often the firmware in these get updated. Assuming it’s not just a pile of ancient relays and stuff. And if, when they do get updated, the algorithms get improved. Or if the algorithm is something that gets sold to the building and “upgrading” is an actual purchase.
Anyway, I could get a little LLM buddy to look it all up but where is the fun in that?