Elevator simulation model
Typical pedestrian models include basic functionalities like corridors, waiting areas, queues, services, slopes and even stairs. Elevators are also a very common transportation method in pedestrian flows, however, they are very complex to model since their behavior is frequently adapted to the type of building where they are used. For instance, small facilities use a single elevator to transport pedestrian between floors in any direction. Higher buildings though requires large banks of elevators where some of them may have dedicated trajectories (i.e. even and odds floors) or even dedicated segments of floors (i.e. some elevators to cover the first half of floors and other elevators to cover the second half, with one or two common floors to transfer).
For small buildings, one can use a fixed logic where all the floors to visit are predefined as entity routes. The elevator can be modeled as a conveyour (see model below)
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If you want to download the source (executable bat file and AnyLogic files), click here.
Dynamic Approach
For higher buildings a more complex logic has to be in place. The following model use an Agent-based approache to emulate the elevators behavior according to the user defined logic. The user can set-up the number of floors, the total elevators, the elevators logic and the type of flow. The model can generate statistics about the total transportation time per pedestrian, the average time in system and the use of resources.
You can download the executable (bat file for windows) here.
You can also download the source files in the following link