BY ANNA GUIDO,
ENQUIRER CONTRIBUTOR

The Destination Floor Guidance System - which was put into operation Friday in the Metropolitan Park West Tower in downtown Seattle - minimizes stops by grouping together passengers with common destinations.

Here's how it works:

Self-standing and wall-mounted kiosks with touch screens are installed in common areas where elevator passengers wait. Passengers enter their destination floor on the touch screen.

The requests are processed, and a message is displayed informing users to ride a specific car.

"In a conventional system, waiting passengers crowd into the first available elevator, which often results in the car stopping at numerous floors, increasing travel time," said Joe Rennekamp, vice president of engineering at Fujitec's corporate offices in Lebanon.

In time, the new Fujitec system becomes even more efficient at grouping passengers by learning elevator-use patterns, said Rennekamp, whose team of engineers pioneered the software for the system. It does this by considering historical information to learn traffic variances in the building.

"The predictive logic in our software acts like neurons in our body, parking the elevators) at certain floors, knowing where the demand might be at certain times."

Users of the new system had mixed reviews.

"One lady walked up to the kiosk, and I told her to enter her floor number, and she said, 'That's ridiculous,' " said Tim Mooney, Fujitec's west regional vice president, who was in Seattle for the launch.

"It's difficult to please everybody in the whole building, but I'm very pleased with the overall outcome of this first day of operation."

Dan Lundberg, general manager of Fujitec Seattle, who was with Mooney, said they heard criticisms, but most building tenants said they thought it was "neat looking" and hoped it would improve elevator service there.

Fujitec America is a leading manufacturer of elevators, escalators and auto-walk systems. The company began its U.S. operations in Lebanon in 1977 and now has 20 sales and service offices in the United States and Canada. The parent company, Fujitec Co. Ltd., was founded in Osaka, Japan, in 1948.

Rennekamp said a form of the "predictability software" is in Fujitec conventional elevator systems but not the kiosks that direct people to certain floors.

"The key innovation is the kiosks," he said.

The Neuros Logic program that runs the system rationalizes and manages the elevator traffic patterns as they change throughout the day using technology such as artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms.

Fujitec competitors Schindler and Thyssen have similar systems, but Fujitec says only its system incorporates artificial intelligence to learn the building's traffic flow.

"Our competitors are using destination-based systems, but they do not use predictive logic with historic data," Rennekamp said.

In addition to the Metropolitan Park West Tower, Fujitec will be installing its system in Park Place Building in downtown Seattle and in The New York Times building in midtown Manhattan.

How the system works:
The Fujitec system keeps the control panels inside the elevators, but passengers who push the inside buttons
lose priority over kiosk controls outside the elevator.

The wait in the elevator lobby may be longer, but the overall time to destination will decrease.

A special button is available to notify the system of passengers with physical disabilities, such as wheel chairs. In these instances, the doors will remain open longer and fewer passengers will be directed to that elevator to
accommodate for extra space.

The systems can be retrofitted onto existing elevators, which might help outdated buildings where traffic exceeds elevator capacity.

The elevator systems can be custom designed to fit user needs.