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Elevator Traffic Analysis: Analytical Versus Simulated

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Elevator Traffic Analysis: Analytical Versus Simulated

Dr. Albert So1, Dr. Lutfi Al-Sharif2

1
School of Science and Technology, The University of Northampton
2
Mechatronics Engineering Department, The University of Jordan

Introduction

Traffic analysis is one of the three key areas associated with the study of elevator
systems, along with the other two areas of drives and of safety components.
Elevator traffic analysis is fundamental to the planning and design of elevator systems.
Over the years, different approaches have emerged, and they can be broadly classified
into analytical and simulated. In this article, we are going to discuss how these two
approaches supplement each other, as well as a third approach based on numerical
methods which is in effect a hybrid approach of the two.

CIBSE Guide D (with the 2010 edition being the latest): Transportation Systems in
Buildings (to be referred to as the Guide later in this article) has been widely used
around the world, in particular Europe and Asia, as a useful reference by elevator
engineers, planners, architects, consultants and code makers. In Chapter 3 of the
Guide, these two approaches are mentioned as two models. The first model uses a
calculation method based on mathematical formulae, usually applicable to up-peak
situations. Such classical model has been used for nearly 80 years and results in a
satisfactory solution for 90-95% of designs. This model is referred to the “analytical
one” in this article whereby a designer can perform the design by hand based on the
equations available. The second model, which has been in use for over 45 years, is
based on a discrete digital simulation of the movement of elevators in a building and
the passenger dynamics. When the Guide was prepared, simulations were
considered relatively slow but as the computer technology has advanced, we can see a
quantum leap in the performance of simulations due to higher processing power that
has lead to shorter simulation times.

In Chapter 4 of the Guide, the whole process of simulation is presented. It starts

with passengers arriving at the landings, followed by registering their landing calls,
boarding the elevators when they arrive, registering their car calls and then ends with
them alighting at their destination floors. It is accepted that simulation is by itself a
very powerful tool. However, the Guide suggests that the good practice is to start all

1
design exercises with a traditional RTT (round trip time) calculation for the following
reasons:
i) The traditional analytical methods are well proven and have stood the test of
time. ; Any differences that are found between results from the two approaches
could alert the designers to errors in the simulation.
ii) Simulation is rather complicated and it is easy for less experienced designers to
make mistakes or miss something unknowingly.
iii) RTT calculations are easier and faster. So the analytical methods could help
guide designers to adopt solutions that are worth testing by simulation.

Having said that, the Guide appreciates that simulations can model the elevator
movements on a trip-by-trip basis, while the analytical method works on an “average”
round trip. Moreover, simulations can evaluate passenger waiting time, transit times,
dwell times and lobby times etc. while the analytical method gives an average interval
only. Simulations are much closer to “real life” and therefore more intuitive; they
can model the supervisory control performance, and finally can display a wide range
of tables and graphs for reference by the designers.

Sorsa and Siikonen (Sorsa et al 2014) are of the opinion that elevator planning for
multi-storey buildings has been based on up-peak RTT calculation while other traffic
conditions are analyzed with elevator traffic simulation. Traffic simulation is also
absolutely essential when planning advanced elevator systems, for which standard
up-peak equations do not apply. Such an opinion is in line with the Guide. In their
article, results from both approaches are compared.

Analytical Calculations

There are two approaches here, namely derivations from first principle or empirical
formulae.

As discussed earlier in this article, the underpinning consideration of the analytical

approach is the RTT evaluation during an up-peak condition. The most widely used
equation for such condition (Barney et al 1985, CIBSE Guide D, Barney 2003) is:

RTT = 2 Htv + ( S + 1)ts + 2 Pt p

Here, tv = df/v where df is the interfloor distance and v is the rate speed of the car; P is
the number of passengers in the car; ts, called the stopping time is equal to tf(1) + to +
tc – tv ( tf(1) is the single floor flight time representing the time of acceleration and

2
deceleration; to is the door opening time; tc is the door closing time); H is the highest
reversal of the typical round trip; S is the expected number of stops of the trip. H
(first derived by Schroeder 1955) and S (first derived by Basset Jones 1923) are given
below.

For non-uniform population distribution around the building with N number of floors,
excluding the ground floor, Ui is the possible number of occupants at the ith floor, i
running from 1 to N.
 N
 Ui  
P

∑
1
S = N 1 − 1 −  
i =1 
 N U  

P
N −1  j 
H=N− ∑∑
 Ui

j =1  i =1
U



If U1 = U2 = ….. = UN = U/N, i.e. uniform population distribution around the building
with a total population, U, the two equations are simplified to:

 N
 U  
P  1  1 
P   1 
P   N −1P 
∑
1
S = N 1 − 1 −   = N 1 − N 1 −   = N 1 − 1 −   = N 1 −   
 N i =1 
NU    N  N     N     N  

P
N −1  j
U 
N −1 P N −1 P
 j  i 
H=N− 
 ∑∑
j =1  i =1
NU 
=N− ∑   =N−
j =1 
N ∑  
i =1 
N

The average time, during up-peak, taken by a passenger to travel inside the car from
the ground floor or the main terminal to the destination floor is called ATT (average
travel time), given by (So et al 2002):
H ( S + 1)
UPATT = 0.5 tv + 0.5 t s ( S + 1) + t p P which can be simplified to:
S

UPATT ≈ 0.5 ⋅ H ⋅ tv + 0.5 ⋅ S ⋅ t s + P ⋅ t p when S >> 1.

The average up-peak journey time spent by a passenger from the moment he arrives at
the lobby of the main terminal until he exits the elevator at his destination floor,
UPAJT, is equal to the sum of UPATT and the up-peak average waiting time, UPAWT.
Equations above have been derived from first principle without any data from any
on-site traffic surveys. The equation above assumes a plentiful supply of passengers in
the lobby and that there are always P passengers available to board the elevator when
an elevator arrives at the main lobby to pick passengers up. The equation must be

3
modified to account for a Poisson passenger arrival process.

The Poisson distribution is a discrete probability distribution that gives the probability
of a given number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time and/or space
provided that events occur with a known average rate and are time independent. A
discrete random variable, X, usually an integer indicating the number of particular
events, said to be Poisson distributed with a positive real parameter, λ, can be given by
the following equation with k = 0 , 1, 2, …..:

λk e − λ
f ( k , λ ) = Pr( X = k ) = .
k!
λ is the arrival rate in events per second or passengers per second. Hence, the shape
of the distribution curve is dependent on the value of the parameter, λ. It is
interesting to know that both the mean and variance of the Poisson distribution are
equal to λ.

A second type of analytical calculation belongs to the class of empirical formulae

which are based on curve fitting from a pool of data collected during on-site traffic
surveys or simulations, i.e. statistics based. For example, the UPAWT formulae
suggested by Barney (1992) represent this type.

  P  
2
UPAWT = 0.4 + 1.8 − 0.77  UPINT for car loads from 50% to 80%; or
  CC  
UPAWT = 0.4UPINT for car loads less than 50%
Here, UPINT stands for up-peak interval; CC stands for contract capacity of the car
and P is as defined above.

Simulations

In addition to its use for system planning and design, simulation is also widely used
for assessing group control algorithms (Hakonen et al 2008; Peters 2013; Al-Sharif
2013). Simulation is either implemented as time-sliced simulation (Peters 2010) or
discrete event simulation (Al-Adem 2012). There are different simulators available
on the market. Let’s take one popular software tool available, for example, Elevate
(Peters 2002) for a more detailed discussion. During the simulation, all events are
advanced by fixed size time slices, say 0.1 s, and as time advances, events change,
traced by the computer program. Events include patterns of arrival of passengers at
different landings known as passenger demand, traffic patterns, registration of landing

4
calls, car movement, boarding and leaving the car, registration of car calls etc.
Different simulation results are obtained when the passenger demand changes, from
low to high, in steps or along a ramp, but the initial conditions should remain
unchanged. And a simulation should last long enough to make the results stable
enough and useable by the designers. Useful results may include the round trip time,
handling capacity, passenger waiting time (minimum, average, peak), passenger travel
time (minimum, average, peak), average number of stops, average highest reversal
floor, passenger transfer time etc.

The art of object oriented programming (OOP) has been adopted. In an object, both
the variables and functions are grouped together, the behavior of which is defined by
the class to which it belongs. Each object is thus an “instance” of a class. In
Elevate, there are different classes, such as the building class that comprises the
number of floors and the array of floor heights etc., the motion class that comprises
the rated speed, rated acceleration, motor start-up delay etc., the elevator class that
comprises the contract capacity, door open/closing time etc., the dispatcher class that
comprises the dispatcher algorithm, up landing calls, down landing calls etc., the
person class that comprises the arrival floor, destination floor, passenger weight etc.
Furthermore, users are allowed to build their own dispatching algorithms into the
simulation for comparison of performances. It is expected that this simulation tool
could be used in the future to run in parallel with a real elevator system for
benchmarking all traffic parameters and assessing satisfactory performance.

Numerical Methods

Any tool used to assess the efficacy of an elevator group control algorithm must meet
the following four requirements (Al-Sharif et al 2014a), namely
i) Repeatable: It is essential that the original designer must be able to get the same
result over a number of runs of the same system with the same parameters.
ii) Reproducible: It is essential that other designers/users must be able to get the
same results as the originator of the group control algorithm.
iii) Transparent: It is essential that the user can easily understand how the group
control algorithm works and how it has been implemented and what parameters
have been assumed, as well as the values used for each parameter.
iv) Objective: The tool must be an objective tool that will allow comparisons
between different group control algorithms under similar conditions.
While is it accepted that simulation is a powerful tool for assessing the effectiveness
of elevator group control algorithms, and can deal with the most complicated

5
conditions and scenarios, it cannot sometimes meet all the four requirements listed
above.

Furthermore, suppose there are L elevators in the group and each can carry P number
of passengers. Every passenger has a destination floor. It can be shown that
(Al-Sharif et al 2014b) the number of unique possible solutions could be up to
(L ⋅ P ) ! which is an astronomical figure. For example, a building of 10 stories high
(P !)L
with 5 elevators each carrying 12 passengers could have up to 3.3 x 1098 solutions
which could not be handled by any super computer in the world.

By numerical methods (Al-Sharif 2014a), a sample of possible scenarios is taken and

handled by Monte Carlo simulation and the final judgment is based on heuristics or
rules of thumb. The following steps show how numerical methods are carried out.
i) a new scenario is generated using a random scenario generator so that each
passenger is randomly assigned to a floor with the probabilities linked to the
floor populations;
ii) for each of the possible scenario generated in (i), the most suitable solution is
found by heuristic methods or by using random search techniques;
iii) steps (i) and (ii) are repeated until a large number of scenarios have been
considered, say 10,000 or even 100,000, still compatible with the capacity of a
good personal computer;
iv) once done, the average value of the best solution for all the scenarios is
calculated and is used as a representative assessment of the group control
algorithm.

Conclusion

So far, we have discussed the three approaches of elevator traffic analysis, analytical,
simulated and numerical. As a matter of fact, the numerical method could be
thought of as a merger between a limited number of simulation scenarios and
analytical equations. The analytical method has been used for decades and are well
proven, having gained the trust of building owners, users, designers and architects.
Simulation is more realistic and better reflects what actually happens with an elevator
system serving a real building.

Currently, an ISO Technical Committee, ISO/TC 178/SC/WG6, chaired by Dr.

Marja-Liisa Siikonen is working on the draft ISO 4190-6 which is about the planning

6
and selection of passenger elevators for use in office buildings, hotels and residential
buildings. It is apparent that the Technical Committee honors both calculation
methods based on up-peak RTT equations and guided simulations.

A validation on the up-peak RTT equations by both simulated up-peak traffic and
measured data of real up-peak traffic was recently conducted (Sorsa et al 2014). It
was shown that both the simulation and real situation fulfilled the assumptions of the
analytical up-peak theory. The results reveal that the theoretical up-peak calculation
represents accurately real traffic only if the equations are based on passenger batches
instead of individual passengers. In the conclusion, the article states that calculation
has to be conducted with realistic elevator parameters and passenger transfer times.

As a final remark, your authors are of the opinion that both calculations and
simulations are essential in elevator system traffic design and analysis. As computer
technology advances, simulation time, whether time-sliced, event based or numerical,
is getting shorter and shorter while results from simulations can give us real and
trustworthy information to allow the design of elevator systems to handle different
kinds of traffic conditions. But on the other hand, a quick calculation must be
performed well before a simulation is conducted. We would like to quote the Dr.
Gina Barney’s speaking as recorded in the CIBSE Traffic Analysis & Simulation Open
Forum Report of May 2007 to end this article:
“Dr Barney was also worried about the over reliance on
simulation vis-à-vis traffic calculations. She considered that
designers should understand their art properly. This
understanding is best approached by carrying out a few simple
calculations. She did agree, however, that the final results
should always be confirmed by simulation as calculations are
precisely mathematically derived and often bear no
resemblance to a simulation.”

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7
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