Glossary
Group Supervisory Control
A system that coordinates multiple elevators serving the same floors, assigning incoming hall calls to the car that can respond most efficiently based on current position, direction, and load.
Group supervisory control is used whenever two or more elevators serve the same set of floors. Rather than each elevator independently responding to hall calls on a first-come, first-served basis, the group supervisor evaluates all pending calls and assigns each one to the car that can serve it with the least overall impact on system performance.
Early group supervisory systems used simple round-robin or nearest-car logic. Modern systems use sophisticated algorithms that consider estimated time to destination, current car load, energy consumption, and predicted future traffic patterns. The most advanced systems use destination-dispatch, where passengers register their destination floor at a terminal in the lobby before boarding, allowing the system to group passengers with similar destinations into the same car and significantly reduce the number of stops per trip.