ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study is to address two major issues: (1) the spread of epidemics such as COVID-19 due to long waiting times caused by a large number of waiting for customers, and (2) excessive energy consumption resulting from the elevator patterns used by various customers. The first issue is addressed through the development of a mobile application, while the second issue is tackled by implementing two strategies: (1) determining optimal stopping strategies for elevators based on registered passengers and (2) assigning passengers to elevators in a way that minimizes the number of floors the elevators need to stop at. The mobile application serves as an input parameter for the optimization toolbox, which employs the exact method and multi-objective variable neighborhood strategy adaptive search (M-VaNSAS) to find the optimal plan for passenger assignment and elevator scheduling. The proposed method, which adopts an even-odd floor strategy, outperforms the currently practiced procedure and leads to a 42.44% reduction in waiting time and a 29.61% reduction in energy consumption. Computational results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed approach.