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Modeling uncertain passenger arrivals in the elevator dispatching problem with destination control

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Abstract

An Elevator Group Control System (EGCS) assigns an elevator of a group to each passenger transportation request by solving a snapshot optimization problem, the Elevator Dispatching Problem (EDP). In the destination control, passengers register their destination floors in the elevator lobbies, after which the EGCS completes the assignment at once and is not allowed to change it later. Therefore, the EDP is formulated as a stochastic optimal control problem, where uncertain future passenger arrivals are modeled by a Poisson and a geometric Poisson process. The EDP is considered as a certainty equivalent controller in which the uncertain quantities are replaced by their expected values, and as a robust controller in which they take multiple values according to risk scenarios. Numerical experiments show that the expectations do not accurately predict EDP variables. The modeling with the geometric Poisson process results in better forecasting accuracy than with the Poisson process and many scenarios that closely match the realizations of the variables. Hence, the scenarios can be used as a basis for a robust EDP which simultaneously minimizes a passenger service quality criterion and its variation due to uncertain demand.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to improve the paper. The first author was partially supported by The Academy of Finland grant number 136040 and by the Education Fund of Finland grant number 88230.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KONE Corporation, P.O. Box 7, 02151, Espoo, Finland

    Janne Sorsa, Juha-Matti Kuusinen, Mirko Ruokokoski & Marja-Liisa Siikonen

  2. Systems Analysis Laboratory, Aalto University School of Science, P.O. Box 11100, 00076, Aalto, Finland

    Harri Ehtamo

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  1. Janne Sorsa
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  2. Harri Ehtamo
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  3. Juha-Matti Kuusinen
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  4. Mirko Ruokokoski
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  5. Marja-Liisa Siikonen
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Correspondence to Janne Sorsa.

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Sorsa, J., Ehtamo, H., Kuusinen, JM. et al. Modeling uncertain passenger arrivals in the elevator dispatching problem with destination control. Optim Lett 12, 171–185 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11590-017-1130-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11590-017-1130-0

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