implementing simple elvator algoirthm

Question

I want to implement simple elevator algoirthm.

people in different floors orders the elevator and the destination floor they want to get to (so you get a {from,to} alert from different floors).

So I got a simple strightforward solution :

once elevator start going in specific direction (lets say up) it will continue doing so , and serve all request of ppl want to go up (only if at the time they were made they were from higher floor in respect to the elevator) until serving the last one. all the request will be kept in an array, so on each floor you can check if someone wants to go on the same current direction.

In addition ill save in two vars (on for up direction and one for down direction) the highest and lowest points of request - hight floor that somebody wants to go up from there , and lowest floor that sombody want to get to lower floors from there - and the elevator allways will be travling between these two points picking all the ppl that want to go on the same direction.

Does this solution make sense/work ? is there something as simple that make more sense?

I saw some priorities queue suggestions while searching in google but didnt really understand what the need of them ..

Thanks for your feedback .

Answer 1

Of course your approach will work but the answer to your question: "Does this solution make sense?" is entirely dependent on the situation.

Priority Queues are used (e.g.) when you want to serve the passenger whoever's destination floor is closest to the current one. Said passenger will have very high priority. This has a disadvantage that when a passenger wants to go to a floor that is far away from the current one, he will be assigned a very low priority and will be served never/late. This can be solved by increasing the priority for a passenger over time.

Your approach has the advantage that there's a maximum waiting time known for all passengers. That is, the time it takes for a person to go to floor 1 when he gets in at floor 2 while the elevator is going up all the way to the penthouse and it stops at all floors along the way. The advantage of knowing this isn't present in the case (or it is at least not easy) in the priority queue approach. But you can imagine that the situation described can be very annoying for the involved passenger since he will have to travel along the full building almost twice to lower just one floor.

Another approach I'm thinking of while writing this makes use of priority queues where the priority of going to a floor is the number of people that needs to get in/off at that floor.

In conclusion, I think the advantage of your approach isn't very useful and it has a big disadvantage as well. I would look into priority queues and then define for yourself what priority means. Maybe your priority is to deliver groups of people to floors at once (last approach) or maybe it's to deliver the passenger whoever's floor is closest, (first approach). As said before, deciding if an approach is good depends entirely on the situation.