Optimal Elevator Banking Under Heavy Up-Traffic

An important design criterion for elevator installations in modern office buildings is the carrying capability during the morning rush-hour. It is common practice to divide the total number of cars into banks, each bank serving a common set of upper floors with an express run to the lowest of these floors. The decision process of how to allocate cars to upper floors is formulated as a dynamic programming problem. Solution to the dynamic program for a given arrangement of cars is the banking policy in which the time to fill the building completely (under heavy up-traffic) is minimized.