Elevator System with Destination Control and Fpga Implementation of Dispatching Algorithms

Elevator systems for vertical transport of passengers are implemented in modern high-rise buildings. Conventional elevator systems use up and down hall-call buttons for calling an elevator service, a group of local control systems (LCS), one per elevator, and an Elevator Group Control System (EGCS) which selects the most suitable elevator for attending a hall-call. The performance of an elevator system is measured by means of several parameters such as the power consumption, average waiting time of passengers, among others. Conventional elevator systems have critical problems, such as, uncertainty about destination calls and number of passengers waiting for an elevator, as well as, a high computational cost. Nowadays, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) devices have been widely used in automation systems, given that reconfigurable architectures can be effectively applied to the realization of complex systems, with good performance and flexibility, keeping the requirements of every process or products in a customized way. In order to improve the performance of the elevator system the Destination Control System (DCS) was introduced in last years. The DCS uses destination keypads in the halls allowing the controller to know the destination floor and the exact number of passengers waiting for a car. This paper proposes a distributed approach for an elevator system, which comprises a network of Destination Control Systems (one per floor), an EGCS based on Fuzzy Logic (FEGCS) running on a CPU and an RS-485 network for connecting several Local Control Systems (LCS), developed on FPGAs, each one of them implementing several dispatching algorithms. The proposed architecture take advantage of the efficient grouping of passengers provided by DCS and the flexibility provided by the FPGAs, allowing to implement, simultaneously, different scheduling strategies according to the traffic situations in the building.