EMERGENT SYNCHRONIZATION IN MULTI-ELEVATOR SYSTEM AND DISPATCHING CONTROL

In this paper, we discuss an emergent behavior of a multi-elevator sys tem. The system includes multiple elevators in an office building and the Poisson arrival of passengers as its input. Elevators move up and down to serve calls and carry passengers according to given working ru les. The system is a representative discrete event dynamic system, and is a nonlinear complex system. When people leave a building at the cl osing time, the down-peak traffic of passengers occurs. We show numeri cally that (if this causes a jamming effect, which reduces the transpo rtation efficiency, (2) there exists a threshold in the arrival rate o f passengers, at which the traffic rate starts decreasing, and (3) thi s jamming effect is due to the synchronization of elevators. Then we p ropose a dispatching control that prevents elevators from synchronizin g. This control is applied to each elevator as an auxiliary working ru le. We can remove the jamming effect and recover the transportation ef ficiency by the control.