Adaptive dispatching control for elevator systems during uppeak traffic

In passenger elevator systems, uppeak is when the majority of passengers are moving up from the first floor, e.g., the start of the day. In a previous paper we proved that the structure of the optimal dispatching policy for uppeak is a threshold policy with thresholds that depend on the passenger arrival rate. Based on that result, we use concurrent estimation to design a controller which adapts its dispatching threshold to changes in the passenger arrival rate. Implementation issues are discussed and numerical performance results are given showing the advantages of the approach over currently used uppeak dispatching controllers.