Consider your daily life: when did you last see a multi-floor building without an elevator? Elevators are essential for modern buildings, significantly impacting the flow of people.
In simulations of multi-floor structures, elevators are essential as well. Pedestrian elevator simulation can mirror reality and add functionality to your models, whether of airports, shopping malls, hotels, or offices. Therefore, it is crucial to include elevators when building a simulation model that aims to replicate real-life scenarios as accurately as possible.
This blog post goes over the various aspects of mastering elevator simulation in AnyLogic.
Contents:
- Why consider elevators in simulation models?
- Video tutorial to build a basic elevator simulation
- Explore advanced techniques for elevator simulations
- Aim for realistic facility simulations
Why consider elevators in simulation models?
As we mentioned above, elevators are essential elements of modern buildings. They speed up the movement of pedestrians, enabling them to reach their target locations quickly. However, elevators can cause delays and slow down other process that affect the model's behavior.
When adding elevators to your models, you should consider their dual roles. While they help pedestrians move between floors, they may also cause bottlenecks and waiting times, influencing your models' overall pedestrian flow.
Video tutorial to build a basic elevator simulation
Before dealing with real-life scenarios of elevator behavior, you should try integrating it into your simulation. Here's a straightforward example demonstrating how an elevator works in a model:
The AnyLogic team has created a detailed guide on how to add elevator simulations to your models. This tutorial helps make modern facility models, regardless of your simulation modeling experience.
Read also: if you don't know how to model a building with several floors, check out our multi-level facilities tutorial.
In the video, we start by opening the Stairs model available on AnyLogic Cloud. It represents a two-story building with a stairway between the floors. We also used the Pedestrian Library and some Java code. The code helps restrict the usage of front and rear doors on each level. We disable the front door on the lower ground and the rear door on the upper ground using these commands: elevator.DisableDoor(LowerGround, ElevatorDoorFront) and elevator.DisableDoor(UpperGround, ElevatorDoorRear).
Following the steps described in the video, you can integrate an elevator simulation into your model.
Explore advanced techniques for elevator simulations
Adding an elevator simulation to your model is only half the way. In AnyLogic, you can go further and model various realistic scenarios, such as queues or elevator failures.
On the AnyLogic Cloud platform, you may see models that recreate various situations or demonstrate different modeling approaches. Below, we have listed several models that showcase different elevator simulation scenarios.
Elevator breakdown
One of the examples provided by the AnyLogic team is the Elevator Failure model. The model shows two types of elevators and pedestrians' behavior.
There are two scenarios for the elevator failure simulation:
- The elevator stops immediately, and passengers are removed with the remove() function to wait for a mechanic.
- The broken elevator continues to the nearest floor using a power generator. You can manually move it using the moveTo() function, allowing passengers to exit before entering the failure state.
In both cases, the cancelAll() function releases all waiting pedestrians, allowing them to exit through the ccl port. New pedestrians will leave after a timeout if the elevator stays inactive.
Elevator manual control
Our engineers use API functions to control the elevator simulation in this model. Initially, the elevator is in manual mode. It enables direct control over the pick-up and drop-off processes by selecting the Pedestrian is transferred by using API option within the PedElevator block.
The interactive model enables you to specify a particular level for the elevator to move to and command it to pick up and drop off passengers as needed.
Elevator connecting floors defined by different agents
This model illustrates how an elevator operates across multiple floors, as defined by various agents. The building has four levels: the parking area, the ground floor with shops, the food court level, and the observation deck.
The elevator's markup is located within the ParkingFloor agent, which represents the ground floor, and it is configured to service all levels of the building, as indicated in the shape's "Levels" property.
Aim for realistic facility simulations
As you can see, when modeling modern facilities, you'll face various challenges in managing these buildings. In our blog posts, we always try to cover related topics, such as pedestrian flow management or the use of CAD drawings to ease simulation processes.
Elevator simulations are crucial for accurately modeling pedestrian flow in modern multi-floor buildings. AnyLogic offers various tools to master your models, from basic integration to handling complex scenarios. Using video tutorials and example models, beginners and experienced developers can enhance their simulations to reflect real-world conditions and challenges accurately.
You can find all these examples and more in our software. If you don't have AnyLogic yet, now is the perfect time to get it and try building your own elevator simulations.
