Control and supervision of groups of elevators using the blackboard architecture approach

Abstract

A novel approach to the control and supervision problem for groups of elevators has been successfully developed and tested by simulation. The control and supervisory tasks have been implemented using the blackboard approach to problem-solving in which several knowledge sources cooperate, providing a very flexible problem-solving framework. The blackboard shell control unit developed in this study uses a dual-level control structure and a comprehensive data structure for the knowledge-source descriptors. The modularity of the control and supervisory system allows the control and supervisory strategies to be modified or extended simply by adjoining additional knowledge sources to the existing ones and tuning different knowledge-source descriptors.