Scheduling of Maglev Elevators : Simulating multiple elevator cars in a two shaft system.

Sammanfattning: Elevator systems have been quite similar for more than a hundred years and it has only quite recently become more feasible to have elevators being able to switch shafts allowing the construction of a system with more than two elevator cars in a single shaft. Such a system is to be constructed and tested during 2016 and functions using magnetic levitation technology. This new system calls for new algorithms to schedule the assignment of the passengers’ calls. Different strategies based on the collective control algorithm were developed to schedule the maglev system. The strategies were tested in a simulation of a twenty-five floor building and compared to a traditional system of one elevator car per shaft using the collective control scheduling strategy. The results show that in two out of the three scenarios simulated the maglev system performs better than the traditional system when average waiting time and average traveling time are compared. The traditional system beats the maglev system by a lot under the interfloor traffic scenario and adding more elevator cars improved the maglev systems performance but not enough to be as good as the tradition system. The conclusions drawn are that it is hard to schedule the maglev system to spread the cars out. It is also clear that the maglev system requires more elevator cars or improved scheduling to perform as well as the traditional system during the interfloor traffic scenario but is performing equally well or better during the up and down-peak scenarios. Further simulations are required to confirm these conclusions as the schedulers used are quite simple.