Elevator simulator design and estimating energy consumption of an elevator system

It has become vitally important to control the use of the energy resources in our world of severe energy depletion. Elevators (and the escalators) constitute an important part in total energy consumption of modern high buildings. Thus, it has grown in importance to estimate the energy consumption of the elevators and to analyze the changes in consumption levels caused by the use of different technology, design, capacity and optimization methods. The use of the simulators specialized in performance estimate and service quality is common in literature since the elevators are suitable, in respect of traffic, to be analyzed by discrete simulation. Using such simulators with some plugins, it can be possible to calculate the energy consumption levels for different scenarios. In this study, a simulator that can produce results to be used in analysis of service quality and energy consumption levels of an elevator is designed. Using the simulator designed, simulation of a real system with poor service quality is carried out. Once the number of elevators is increased, it has been found that the service quality is improved to a desired level, and contrary to expectations, the level of energy consumption is decreased. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.