We have developed a new door coupler of an elevator for high-rise buildings, which makes it possible to close hall doors smoothly, even when a large difference in atmospheric pressure occurs between an elevator shaft and a hall. The door coupler consists of simple mechanisms, including a fixed vane, movable vane and a bistable spring unit attached to the movable vane. This paper firstly describes an estimate of the difference in atmospheric pressure and secondly describes the design concepts of the door coupler.

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Machine room-less elevators have become a mainstream in a low-speed elevator, and the demand of the space saving of elevator shaft has risen more and more because of the viewpoint of effective use of the building. We developed the "Smooth Emergency Terminal Slowdown (SETS) system" for space saving of elevator shaft. The SETS system is composed as an electric safety device. It came to be able to apply to low-speed elevators where the conventional emergency terminal slowdown system had not been applied.

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Recently, the demand of space-saving of the elevator shaft has risen more and more. It is indispensable for development of the space-saving elevator to design with high reliability. Then, we developed the simulator, which has a normal state and some abnormal states transited by safety logic described as a state transition model, to evaluate the effect of the design quantitatively. This report described the outline of the developed simulator.

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By a result of questionnaire investigation to an end user and a developer and a monitor examination, it depended and developed a high elevator of customer value what there was in the element that an elevator was bought other than means of movement by a user. As a result, I accepted the situation and a state by sorting a user and aimed at a reliable feeling offering comfortable convenience and developed the elevator which assumed "Security&Safty/Universal Design" a concept.

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Evolutionary Computation (EC) which models the mechanisms in evolution of biology has been studied and applied to various real world systems recently. Among them, Elevator Group Supervisory Control System (EGSCS) is one of them and practical applications of it by Genetic Algorithm (GA), have been reported. On the other hand, Genetic Network Programming (GNP) has been proposed as a new method of evolutionary computation recently. GNP consists of a directed graph, so it is expected to realize the efficient performances for EGSCS. In this paper, a new EGSCS using GNP is proposed and studied.

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Elevator group supervisory control systems are required to serve many passengers with small variation of waiting time, especially in heavy traffic. In order to equalize and shorten passengers' waiting time, it is known that cars should be operated at equal time intervals. In this paper, first, we describe a concept of an elevator group supervisory control system on which we focus on future trajectories of cars. Features of this control concept are as follows: (1) the system controls future trajectories of cars by referring to reference trajectories of them, and (2) the reference trajectories of cars are set to distribute the cars in the near future term. Second, we describe implementation algorithm for a microcomputer based on the above control concept. In this algorithm, the system controls time intervals among predicted trajectories of cars. Results of computer simulations of this control method show good performance especially in heavy traffic.

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This paper presents a new method for elevator supervisory control system in order to reduce long waiting passengers. In past, the methods of rules with AI or accurate arrival time prediction based on ETA(Estimated Arrival Time) have been applied, but they are not enough to reduce long waiting passengers. We propose a cars cooperative method for elevator supervisory control systems. The method consists of two phases: (i) prediction of generating long waiting passengers in fiiture, (ii) assigning a car to new hall call in consideration of present passengers and predicted future passengers. The result of experiment shows the proposed method can reduce long waiting passengers rate by 18%-51% from conventional one.

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This paper presents a new critical event detection method simplified for an embedded appliance mounted on an elevator car. We first define that the critical event is unusual action such as violent action, counteraction, etc, and introduce the violent action degree(VAD). We use an optical flow based method to analyze the current state of the motion through an ITV(Industrial Television) camera. After motion analysis, we calculate a normalized statistical value, which is the VAD. The statistical value is the multiple of the optical flow direction variance, the optical flow magnitude variance, and optical flow area. Our method calculates the statistical value variance and normalize it by the variance. At last we can detect critical event by thresholding the VAD. In addition, we should detect persons and objects staying in an elevator for a long time. For this purpose, we apply texture background subtraction method. Our violent action detection method detects 80% of critical events where at most 6% of false acception and object detection method detects 99% where about 1% of false acception.

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An electromagnetic suspension system, which guides an elevator car without any contacts, reduces vibration and noise problems caused by misalignment and misconnection of the guide rails. The magnetic levitation by zero power control is effective in guiding the elevator car. The magnet unit for zero power control comprises permanent magnets and electromagnets. The structure and composition of the magnet unit affect the electromagnetic characteristic and performance. This paper explains the design of a magnet unit suitable for zero power control, and introduces the dynamic characteristics of an elevator car with this guide system.

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Vibration of an elevator system is one of the most significant factors that influence the riding comforts level. In order to reduce the vibration level, it is desirable to design optimum parameters of the mechanical and control system of the elevator. This paper describes the vibration analysis of mechanical and control models, and highlights some of the features of the new Mini-Machine Room Elevator System.

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