WEI Dong, ZHANG Jingyuan, FANG Shuo
The current elevator group control scheduling system has insufficient debugging safety, high difficulty in design evaluation, and high debugging costs. Therefore, a simulation model for elevator group control is developed. Based on this model, the elevator group control scheduling scheme is dynamically evaluated according to indicators such as the average waiting time of passengers, long-time waiting rates, and the energy consumption of the elevators. To address the issues of low elevator operation efficiency and poor passenger comfort during elevator rides, a deep Q network (DQN) is developed to realize optimized scheduling for elevator group control. The corresponding state space, reward signals, and agent structure are designed by the primary factors affecting elevator transportation efficiency. Considering the lengthy duration of online training for reinforcement learning agents and the challenge of providing real-time decision support, the operational data from the elevator group control simulation model is utilized to train a feedforward neural network, and an elevator group control environment prediction model is developed to serve as the agent training environment. Simulation experiments are conducted by using the elevator group control simulation model. The results showed that, compared with the prevalent minimum response time strategy, the proposed strategy reduces the average waiting time of passengers, average time that passengers spend in the elevator, long-time waiting rate, the number of elevator starts and stops, and increases the average number of arrivals within 5 minutes.