Optimal lift movement based on rest prediction

Abstract

Existing elevator control systems in office buildings primarily rely on reactive scheduling strategies that respond only after passenger requests occur, leading to increased waiting times during peak traffic periods. Although reinforcement learning (RL) and deep learning approaches have been explored for intelligent elevator control, many existing methods require high computational complexity and large training datasets, limiting their suitability for embedded elevator controllers and practical smart-building deployment. To address this gap, this paper proposes a lightweight predictive elevator control framework based on the eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) machine learning algorithm for rest-floor prediction. The proposed method uses historical traffic patterns and temporal features to predict future demand floors and proactively reposition idle elevators before passenger requests occur. A comprehensive simulation was conducted for multiple office-building configurations with varying numbers of floors and elevators over one year of operation using realistic traffic patterns. The proposed predictive strategy was compared with a conventional reactive control approach. Results show that the proposed framework reduces cumulative passenger waiting time by approximately 11%–22%, with larger improvements observed in high-rise and high-traffic scenarios, while maintaining comparable energy consumption. The study demonstrates that lightweight supervised machine learning can provide an effective and computationally efficient solution for predictive elevator control in embedded smart-building systems.