9311776 Cassandras This proposal is in response to the Engineering Faculty Internship Initiative. The objective of the proposed project is to provide the opportunity for the Principal Investigator and two graduate students to closely work with the OTIS Elevator Company, in order to develop and test several dynamic dispatching schemes for elevator systems. These are novel schemes based on research carried out by the PI and his students in the broader context of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems (DEDS). In particular, the solution to some dispatching control problems is of a form which ultimately depends on a set of discrete "threshold" parameters. Some of the proposed schemes are based on "learning" the optimal values of these parameters, based on readily observed data from an elevator system and by applying techniques recently developed for the on-line control of stochastic DEDS. Thus, this is an opportunity to put some theory developed for DEDS control and performance optimization to the test, as well as to gain a better understanding of a class of DEDS and related problems of design, analysis, control, and performance optimization. In accordance with the guidelines of this Initiative, the OTIS Elevator Company has already made a commitment of $30,000 (non-federal funds) to support this effort and has assigned a co-investigator for the project. ***
