alt Hacker NewsAs the article says, the problem with destination dispatch is that it 'locks in' an elevator. The passenger gets told at call time what elevator to go to, and it can't change that mid flight. RSR has the advantage that the passenger has no idea which elevator will come, and so RSR can change the elevator they will get in real-time as conditions change. This was an insight I had not considered before reading the article.
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That sounds like two separate things then. Could you not have people select a destination without locking in an elevator?
(I've never encountered destination dispatch myself, so I'm not really sure how it works in practice)
I think the problem with simulations like this is that it doesn't include the chaos of innatentive humans.
Forcing functions that dump people into well defined funnels can have such a high net positive effect it more than makes up for theoretical losses.
It's like narrow, hard road bike tires losing performance because of deflection from rough road surfaces and how long it took designers to factor that in to real bikes.
Seems like the obvious solution is to put a bank of floor numbers above each elevator and when one arrives the floors it has been assigned to go to light up and the people going to them get in that one. So each person only needs to quickly to see if it's going to their floor or not, much like they need to look to see if it's going up or down. Then you can dynamically dispatch elevators right up until 5s or so before it arrives at a floor, with full knowledge of not just up/down but also destination. (And hell make 'em say how many people are in their party too so you also know how many people are traveling and where.)