elevators

Simulating elevators

Simulate skyscraper with elevator system in it.

* Why - This is more interesting
* Goal — simulate how height of building and number of elevators effects travel time through the building
* Stack — Python + Rich, UV, click

What will it do?

• The simulator is a command line program that runs a elevator transit time simulation and reports results.

Problem Statement

I’ve often heard that as buildings get taller a higher fraction of their volume has to be used up by elevators to maintain reasonable travel speeds, lets test this in a simulation.

Entities

*People
    age, destination, location
*Floors 
    size
*Elevators
    floors, capacity, speed, space requirements 

Assumptions:

* A floor is 3m tall
* Buildings are evenly composed of floors, extra height is dropped.
* Elevators have constant speed, pretend we averaged it
* Elevators fit 10 people
* Elevators can move up to 5 floors and stop within one turn which is approximately a minute

Questions:

* Do we simulate only people arriving to work or also leaving occasionally? Hotel California?
* How do we calculate the volume needed by elevators per floor (Do we need this?)
* How much utility/accuracy do we lose by using turns? 

Notes:

* We will start with 1 elevator, once that is working will continue if warrented.
* We are not cleaning up entities as we go along even though it would be more efficient. 
* Note this makes the program cpu bound as the number of people increases very likely due to filter use.

1. Pick / Generate building
2. User picks number of people and distribution
3. Simulation runs

Simulation

### function which generates new people who want to go to floors.
   * Do we generate all people ahead of time and put them in queue? 
   * More memory efficient to generate as we go

* People with destinations are added to the buil ding
* Elevators move picking people up and dropping them off

How to run the program

uv run main.py

uv run main.py --help

Note we are using uv from https://github.com/astral-sh/uv for experimentation

Note we explored more complicated simulations in the brainstorming phase than we actually implemented.

Reference buildings

Burj Khalifa height : 829.8m elevators: 57 speed 10m/s stories : 163

The E.V. Haughwout Department Store in New York City height: 24m elevators : 1 speed: 0.2032 m/s stories: 5

Empire State building (Original buildout) stories: 102 height 380m elevators: 58 speed: 3.55m/s