Study and Simulation of Five-Story Elevator Controller Using VHDL

Modern technological advancements call for efficient usage of space. Connectivity is often achieved in high rise buildings with the help of conventional staircases, or escalators and most commonly used - elevators. Elevators are used on a daily basis in a wide variety of applications worldwide. The basic mechanism used in an office elevator is also used in dumbwaiters. This work shows the study and simulation of one such application - a five-story elevator controller. A Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) has been used in this project due to its re-programmability, reusability, and faster and less expensive prototyping. The elevator controller system uses a Finite State Machine (FSM) to take floor inputs from inside the elevator and up and down calls from outside the elevator, to determine the movement of elevator from current state to the desired next state. States have been defined floor wise, depending on whether the elevator doors are to be opened or closed. Sensors are used to improve the reliability and safety of the elevator by positioning it appropriately. This elevator controller system has been successfully implemented on Xilinx Zynq - 7000 FPGA using Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL).