I think this has come up before. I'd love to know what a real elevator programmer thinks about it. I suspect real-world approaches to the problems the game presents are relatively simple, and you spend most of your time on corner cases and other issues that you would never anticipate if you weren't in the industry.
I know you can program them to "idle" on different floors depending on time of day, and prioritize certain floors (e.g., try to always have one ready to go on the ground floor).
I wouldn't be surprised if you could find systems that integrate with hotel doors, and when a hotel door is opened and the light turned off on floor ten, it works to get an elevator sent to floor ten.
I think this is a system where AI could shine. Trained on every possible data point you can get from the building (status of individual lights, room occupancy, etc), it might end up with a better strategy than what a human could come up with.
It is a really great game. I am sure that the game has been on hackernews before as I think I read about it here a long time ago. In the old thread there was a comment from a poster that worked with elevators and he said it was pretty close to the real thing! However it missed one important thing… You could do the most effective algorithms, but everything broke down when partners having their own special badge summoned an elevator. They should have the first empty one, and they should ride alone to their office floor.
Thanks, I knew there was a better way than the search bar below, but was in a bit of a hurry. Regarding the links, it must have been in 2015 I read about it.
There are (were? maybe they are getting better) a lot of awful elevator programming out there. I assume whoever programmed it was a contractor given a week to get something working, and then they used the same logic ever since.
There was some touchscreen elevator I had to deal with where it couldn't work without bouncing, so trying to get floor 12 would end up with floor 11, 22, 1, 2 and maybe if lucky 12.
I only found on my last day there a handicap accessible button panel that had all the floors as actual physical buttons.
