Documentation
VT Planner Technical Glossary
Definitions for VT Planner elevator traffic metrics and concepts, including RTT, interval, handling capacity, waiting time, journey time, dispatch, and zoning.
This glossary summarizes terms used in VT Planner reports and forms.
Main Metrics
| Term | Use in VT Planner |
|---|---|
RTT |
Round trip time for a car in a representative cycle. It is useful as an initial design and consistency check, even when simulation is used later. |
Interval |
Average separation between group departures or services. In up-peak evaluations it is often related to RTT / number of elevators, but it does not replace passenger experience metrics. |
Handling capacity |
System capacity to move passengers during a reference window. In elevator traffic it is often expressed as HC5: passengers transported in five minutes and percentage of population. |
Average waiting time |
Average time from when the passenger enters the queue or registers a call until they can board. It may continue if the car arrives but the passenger cannot board due to load or another restriction. |
Average transit time |
In-car component between origin and destination. |
Average journey time |
Total passenger experience time: waiting plus in-car travel and, where applicable, final alighting. |
Traffic and Simulation
| Term | Use in VT Planner |
|---|---|
Up-peak |
Pattern dominated by passengers entering through the main access and traveling to upper floors. |
Down-peak |
Pattern dominated by passengers traveling down toward exit floors. |
Interfloor |
Movement between non-main floors. |
Mixed |
Combination of incoming, outgoing, and interfloor traffic. |
Dispatcher |
Strategy that assigns calls to cars during simulation. |
Destination dispatch |
Approach where the passenger enters the destination at the landing before boarding. The system assigns a specific car and can group compatible destinations. |
Zoning |
Division of floors or destinations into service zones. It can improve capacity or RTT, but can also change waiting and journey time depending on demand and car assignment. |
Operating Parameters
Capacity factor (%): percentage of rated capacity used as the operating limit.Load bypass (%): occupancy threshold above which a car may skip new calls.Seed: value used to reproduce a stochastic simulation.Duration (min): simulated time.Confidence level: confidence level used in adaptive multi-run simulations.Target precision (s): target precision, in seconds, for stopping an adaptive process.