extend / elevators

Elevator control system demonstrating Erlang/OTP upgrades.

Elevators Demo

Elevator control system demonstrating Erlang/OTP upgrades.

History

Originally written by Håkan Huss in the late 90s at Erlang Systems.

It was part of the 5-day Erlang Literacy course aimed at test and support staff of the GPRS project. It was used as a lab exercise in several parts of the course to practise different topics such as behaviours, supervisors, release handling, etc. The first exercise using the elevator example was the mentioned "bug" that the elevator always stopped at every floor (it is actually not a bug, but an elevator scheduler which is trivially guaranteed to fulfill the requirements on elevator scheduling used in the example). Several refinements of the scheduling were made in the course lab exercises.

Since the purpose of the exercise was to use many different aspects of Erlang and OTP, the code has been written to use many behaviours rather than to be the "best" solution for the problem. The resulting architecture should still be pretty good, though.

It has also been used to demonstrate how Quick Check can test elevator systems, and featured in a few academic papers.

Thanks go to Francesco Cesarini and Håkan Huss for the historical informations.

Quick start

• Make sure you have make and rebar installed and in your $PATH
• Type make to build everything
• Start the release with ./_rel/bin/elevators console
• Make elevators move and notice they stop at each floor
• (Exercise: Find bugs, fix them and build a release upgrade)
• Place fixes in upgrade/scheduler.erl
• Run ./v1to2.sh

Troubleshooting

The current compilation process prepares the demo entirely, but doesn't double check things. If something fails during the compilation or the release generation, you might want to reset the working directory.