Elevator Saga – An elevator programming game

A project during my graduate work was to solve this problem. You can read my write up, which includes pseudo-code for the best algorithm I found[1]. Long story short: a simple, rules-based algorithm defeated my best efforts at having multiple elevators working together to coordinate their action. [1]: https://clarkmoody.com/Moody_AgentBasedElevatorControl.pdf

Made me remember an interesting anecdote: During my PhD at Purdue I had the good luck to take the Pattern Recognition (nowadays would be called ML) course from Prof. Fukunaga, one of the pioneers in the field (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keinosuke_Fukunaga). In one of his classes he mentioned that years ago a company came to him, requesting his expertise in optimizing movement of a bank of elevators. He thought it would be trivial :-) After telling us that all his approaches failed miserably…

At SciFi conventions I had a friend who was good at lock picking, and he picked the lock of the elevator control room at the top of the hotel. The elevators were controlled by cabinets of relays, and there was a schematic of the elevator controller, which was pretty straightforward to follow and not too complicated. You could trigger the elevator into going to different floors by toggling the relay corresponding to the call button with a pencil. On one…

Well hell here goes my afternoon... I've always wondered if I could write a good elevator algorithm. This gives me a framework to experiment with.