Posted 2005-06-17 22:49:03 by
Jim Crawford
There are three elevators in the office building in which I work, and they serve four floors. Extrapolating from their behavior, I'm guessing the intelligence of the elevator controller isn't a big factor in the elevator market.
These elevators are used extremely rarely, during the hours I make use of them, perhaps once every 10 minutes. Given this, and given three elevators for four floors, you would expect that three out of four times, by design if not by chance, there would be instant response to a call button. In their current implementation, there's always at least a 10 second wait. Every time. Even if the elevator doors just closed with noone in the elevator.
If they wanted to really improve performance, they could try correlating time of day with what floors people call the elevator from. Even a hardcoded “try to keep an elevator at the ground floor in the morning” and “try to keep elevators on floors 2 through 4 in the evening” would likely be a substantial improvement over chance, which in turn would be a substantial improvement over the current implementation.
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