A State of the Art on the Most Relevant Patents in Vertical Transportation in Buildings

Abstract

Nowadays, the building industry and its associated technologies are experiencing a period of rapid growth, which requires an equivalent growth regarding technologies in the field of vertical transportation. Therefore, the installation of synchronised elevator groups in modern buildings is a common practice in order to govern the dispatching, allocation and movement of the cars shaping the group. So, elevator control and management has become a major field of application for Artificial Intelligence approaches. Methodologies such as fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, ant colonies, or multiagent systems are being successfully proposed in the scientific literature, and are being adopted by the leading elevator companies as elements that differentiate them from their competitors. In this sense, the most relevant companies are adopting strategies based on the protection of their discoveries and inventions as registered patents in different countries throughout the world. This paper presents a comprehensive state of the art of the most relevant recent patents on computer science applied to vertical transportation.

A Survey of Elevator Group Control Systems for Vertical Transportation: A Look at Recent Literature

“…Such algorithms must address the different traffic patterns that occur in a building, that is, up-peak traffic (the period in which people move up from the ground floor or basements to the floors in the building), down-peak traffic (the period in which people move down from different floors to the ground floor and basements), midday or lunch-peak traffic (for a mix of up peak and down peak at midday), and interfloor traffic for the remaining periods. It is common to dispatch service calls by relying on artificial intelligence algorithms, including genetic algorithms, tabu algorithms, fuzzy logic, and neural networks, and some of the more relevant companies have developed patents using such methodologies [3].…”

“…The recent investment in the elevator sector together with the lack of a state-of-the-art product was the main motivation for writing this article. Surveys of the field of elevator control are rare, although one exception is a study of the patent literature [3]. This article is broader in scope, in that it reviews patents and the scientific literature together.…”